


Magical We

by PastelWonder



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: A Victorian romance between Star Wars characters set in Hogwarts, Alternate Universe, Arranged Marriage, Because I DO WHAT I WANT, Breeding, Crossover, Deatheater Armitage Hux, F/M, Falling In Love, Marriage Law Challenge, May-December Romance, Muggleborn Rey, Pureblood Armitage Hux, Underage Kissing, Underage Sex, reluctance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-27
Updated: 2020-01-22
Packaged: 2020-09-27 23:30:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 4
Words: 33,760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20416105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PastelWonder/pseuds/PastelWonder
Summary: In the midst of a magical crisis and with a new class of Deatheater rising, the fate of the Wizarding World dangles by a red string...





	1. Spooky how the time flies when one is having fun

**Author's Note:**

  * For [januarywren](https://archiveofourown.org/users/januarywren/gifts).

> *presses palms together and covers mouth with fingertips* How can I explain what is happening...
> 
> Firstly, let me say that I adore Harry Potter and its many forms of fanfiction - years ago my darkfic aspirations were inspired by our late and beloved Ms_Figg. You may find her treasured works here: http://members.adult-fanfiction.org/profile.php?no=1296780263
> 
> Do shout out to me in the comments if you are already familiar with her works. I'd love to fangirl with you.
> 
> But I digress.
> 
> This... abomination, let's call it, is dedicated to snowytuesday, a talented author and avid reader of my trashfires who has so sweetly started to share her stories with us here on Archive. Check out her Works page: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snowytuesday/pseuds/snowytuesday
> 
> This is an underage Marriage Law Challenge sex story feat. Death Star General-turned-Deatheater Armitage Hux and our favorite garbage baby, Rey. If you find yourself here by mistake, please hit the back button to find other Rux works more to your taste.

On an immodest estate inside the county of Derbyshire, very near the country village of Bakewell, an old grey stone manor scowled out at the soft-ceiled night and its undulating pastures painted all shades of indigo shadow. It glowered through a single lead-paned window on its third floor.

And like a slit pupil possessed by a tick, a man dressed imperiously in black cut a pendulous sliver as he paced before the broiling hearth. He was a young man, proud-looking, with sharp eyes the color of wet sapphires and hair as bright-burning as the firelight. His dress was most unusual for a modern man of the twenty-first century.

But then, he was not a modern man.

He kept his long, pale hands clasped loosely behind his back as he paced.

“General Hux,” an anxious but chipper voice piped suddenly through the brilliant _crack-hiss _of the fire.

The General’s dark, elegant robes hushed softly as he executed a swift one-quarter turn on the heels of his polished dark boots and regarded the grate.

Behind his breast, his heart began to pound.

“Ah, Mister Weasley. At last,” the face in the fire grate flinched at the severity of his tone, “I was beginning to wonder if you’d forgotten our _appointment.”_

“No, not at all General, no no, I- the thing of it is- Well. You’d better see for yourself, hadn’t you?” Mister Weasley’s apparition shifted to avoid his eyes as it chuckled.

The man was notoriously apprehensive of Deatheaters, and the General was reputed to be the deadliest of them all.

“Had I? Well then,” he reached delicately into the fine canister upon the mantle for a pinch of floo powder, “Let us not delay.”

The apparition tried for a cheerful smile and did not succeed. “Right, yes- let us not…”

Green light burst forth from the fireplace, casting an eerie, ghostly aura through the lead-paned window onto the lawn below as the young General tossed his hand at the flames.

He stepped swiftly through the portal.

“You- you see, son - er, sir. It’s just that-” Weasley was scurrying along to keep time with the General’s much longer, more graceful gait.

The alley they were following belonged to a muggle neighborhood, some grubbly little urban town south of London where its inhabitants sheltered under shopping trolleys and huddled near bin-fires and where hardy weeds and the butts of cigarettes collected in the cracks of the streets and cement walkways lined by graffitied, falling down chain link fence. It was well past midnight, the fetid air was hung thick with the stench of urine and smoldering rubbish and black tar and human despair. The only sources of light were the pale wreaths of mournful glow from the disparate street lamps and from the lantern Weasley carried by hand.

There were no stars.

The General’s lip curled as the other man continued to ramble like some lunatic breeder make excuses for a poorly kept kennel.

“The girl, that is to say your _intended_, she- Well you see her _kin _are- they’re rather not, erm-” Weasley halted them abruptly before a cut-out, misaligned gate in the row of chain link, above which hung a sign:

_Plutt’s Garage and Salvage Yard_

“They’re a bit below par. Even for muggles,” the muggle curator finished by indicating a small space between ruddy thumb and forefinger. He rallied, “But I daresay you’ll find her quite up to snuff.”

He winced at his own choice of words.

The General grasped his lapel with his leather gloved hand and reviled at the state of the yard beyond the gate. _This _was the home of his bride? He could not imagine what kind of revolting _creature _lie beyond the gate that he of all men should marry.

_By the gods-_

“Surely you’re joking. She cannot live _here-”_

“Oh yes, no yes, she does! She very much does,” Weasley nodded emphatically, making the lantern creak.

Down the street, a muggle near her trolley let out a vicious cough.

The General sneered.

“The Sorting Hat was very specific, you see. Very, _very_ particular about the uh-” he couldn’t quite bring himself to say, _couples__. _“- the matches. It’s all a bit clandestine, I know. But she’s a very sweet girl. Very agreeable, from what I’ve observed. I’m sure that in time…” he trailed off.

Through the mottled chain link, the General peered closely at the garage’s façade.

_What sort of animal raises a child here?_

He lilted his chin imperiously. “I will not sign the contract until I’ve inspected the girl. I reserve my right to refuse her.”

“Yes yes yes, of course, yes yes!” Weasley fumbled within the layers of his peculiar clothes until at last he produced his wand. “You should see, you won’t be disappointed. Oh, no no no. The hat is never wrong-”

He looked over both shoulders at the muggles scattered like driftwood about the street before he charmed open the lock with a subtle, gentle flick of his wrist. Then as if remembering something, he glanced sheepishly up at the General. “She, ah, she won’t know who you _are. _Or that is to say, even _what _you are-”

“How would she?” the General spared him a credulous snort before stepping soundlessly through the grating steel gate into the salvage yard.

He flowed like a wraith over the crackled uneven pavement, the trail of his rich black robes a false shadow in his wake. What little wan light washing from the street lamps gleamed against the hardness of his cold eyes and glinted when it caught on his hair turned the color of blood by darkness.

Oh yes, he was a Deatheater. And a gruesome sight to behold.

As he sieved through the shadows, he observed all around him the unkempt heaps of rubber wheels and automobile parts, as well as several large, dangerous-looking pieces of machinery that were well worn and metal waste piled two-men high. The garage itself was small with many broken windows boarded over with lap, some of which that had begun to rot.

Midway through, he noticed he was yet unaccompanied and turned.

The muggle lover was still hovering about entrance with his lantern, watching outward with soft, sentimental eyes the muggles that paid him no-never-mind strewn like scattered scraps of parchment along the street.

_Foolish man._

“Weasley,” he called, quiet but severe, “aren’t you coming?”

He gestured at the garage.

“No no, sir!” Weasley lifted the lantern higher, casting his face in dramatic shapes of dark and light. “I cannot pass beyond this point. The wards that protect the um-”

_Brides._

“- the girls, you see, they’re quite ironclad.” He demonstrated by stepping forward, only to be held back by a ripple in the air. “Very old magic. Only the- well, the uh-”

_Grooms._

“Only you may enter from this point on.”

_Only I._

The General felt the burden of that mantle – that _obligation – _drape heavily across his shoulders.

_High decree of the Ministry, indeed, _he thought bitterly as he resumed through the assorted towering heaps of rubbish. _How Albus must be cawing to himself even now-_

The mark on his forearm throbbed hatefully as wandlessly, he charmed himself into the garage.

A quick assessment of its layout told him his _beloved _would be living upstairs, above the rusted bays. He eyed the decrepit, rotted staircase and mold-stained walls and ground his teeth.

Oh yes, he had no doubt Dumbledore had made this match to adjudge him. It was disgraceful enough that a mudblood child-wife should be foisted upon him, but that she should come from such _squalor _was an insult beyond-

“Oh,” he breathed ineloquently. As time itself stopped.

Indeed, the very Earth he stood upon ceased to spin.

For he had reached the small room at the top of the stairs. And there-

There was a large, fat man snoring heinously on a single, somewhat clean cot. And a tiny, sooty corner piled with a nest of rags, on which slept-

The loveliest living china doll in all the world.

_Gods help me._

She was… _perfection. _Beauty, innocent and sweet. Her magic was fragile, tender and feminine. It beckoned him, and like a soul to the Veil of Mysteries, he went.

“Hello, sweet one_,” _he whispered kneeling, not caring if the wax-like layer of black filth on the floor sullied his suit pants beneath his robes.

They pooled black velvet around him as reverently staring he nipped off his gloves. He shifted soundlessly, breathlessly over her.

She could be no more than six years old.

It was not carnality that swelled his chest to aching and made his mark _burn _and his blood rush ravening around his heart. No, it was an even more mystifying, horrifying emotion that overwhelmed him as he gathered her fragile wrists in his warm hands, being delicate with her brittle bones. And as he studied her soft-sleeping face in the near lightlessness until he was sure it was engraved in his soul.

It was tenderness_. _

A dark love-flower blooming in the still, gloomy night.

_For calamity, there go I._

“My my, aren’t you a lovely little surprise?” gingerly, he lifted her into his arm.

Her slightness disturbed him. He kissed her ruddy cheek and coaxed her matted hair behind her ear as adoringly as if it was a silken curl.

Even now, as she slept deeply, her magic hummed to his. Souls twining in a dance that transcended birth and circumstance.

_Belonging._

She was his.

Mister Weasley’s eyes were growing larger and larger alongside his alarm for every sure stride the General took towards him away from the garage.

“Ah, I wait, sir- General! You, now you mustn’t-” he held out his arms at his sides and flapped them like a great stupid bird, making the lantern bob its light, “I must ask what you think you’re doing, sir!”

The General stepped smoothly around him without a second glance. “Taking my wife to her new home.”

“You- you cannot simply _take her_! The Ministry mandates that you- General, _the yard!”_

“None of that is my concern,” the General said coolly as he made his way to a subtle spot down the walkway.

He stopped and refolded his robes around the small sleeping bundle in his arms as he prepared to Apparate, taking extra care with her tiny, bone-thin hands. His marked seared painfully, a warning that he was too close to one with impurity.

He ignored it as he crooned, “There we are, fingers nicely tucked now. We don’t want lose any, do we?” he chuckled, “Heavens no…”

Around them, though they remained unnoticed, the muggles laid about the street were beginning to rouse. Drawn to the flashes of roaring flame like moths to a fire, they shambled themselves and their trolleys up to peer through the chain link at the garage he had set ablaze.

Weasley had dropped his lantern and was waving his wand frantically, futilely, to save the salvage yard.

“We’ll get you all tidied up, and then you may have a treat. Would you like that, little dove? Yes,” he smiled, watching the flames lap higher as they consumed garage. Their light danced on the surface of his cold, damned eyes before he and his bride winked out of the night.

“Professor Dumbledore…” poor, dear, frazzled Arthur stood in the Headmaster’s study with wand in hand. A length of rosewood with a pegasus’ tail core, he turned it round and round again.

The Headmaster smiled kindly over the rim of his half-moon glasses. “My dear boy, won’t you sit down?”

Arthur grasped the low back of the tufted leather chair instead. “It’s just that I-I-I feel that we’ve made a _grave mistake-”_

“Lemon drop?” the Headmaster offered him the crystal dish.

“No, no thank you,” Arthur stumbled, then recovered, “he is a _monster_, and we- she is- this could go _very _wrong, don’t you see?”

“Mm,” the Headmaster fished intently through the bowl, “I rather prefer the littler ones, myself…”

“Sir!” Arthur balked.

“I was speaking of the candies, of course,” the Headmaster rasped patiently as he sat back and folded his hands. Though his expression was placid, benign even, there was a quicksilver flash across his eyes behind his half-moon glasses.

“Please do not worry yourself, Arthur,” again, he smiled, “All will be well. General Armitage Brendol Hux will sooner cut out his own Dark Mark than harm that girl,” as if batting away a compliment, he waved his hand, “but those are things yet to pass-”

“Professor?”

“Suffice it to say, she is in good hands,” Albus stood.

It was far smoother a gesture than a man his age should be capable of.

He extended the candy dish again. His eyes danced with secret futures waiting to unfurl.

“Come now, Arthur, as the muggles say. _One for the road.”_

_Five years later... _

Rey’s heart skitter-pattered. She braced her foot on the little bottom lip of her luggage trolley and for the one _jillionth _time, tipped her chin and lifted her hand to check her emerald green bow.

It was still lofted, large and sweet as kitten ears above her ponytail, the soft ends of which flickered over her shoulder as she looked back and piped, “_Rose-eee! Hurry up!”_

Her best friend forever gripped her own trolley and kicked her patent mary janes against the smooth cobblestone to make double-time across the platform.

The cart juddered loudly, drawing even _more _attention from the muggles as Rosie skidded to a landing that jolted Rey’s trolley and upset her rainbow leopard bags with the pink sparkle spots. Tucked on its perch inside its cage, Rosie’s horned owl screeched.

“Watch it!” Rey shrieked.

Rosie scrunched her shoulders to her ears and squinched her eyes. “Sorry…”

Rey fumed as she reached over both their carts and fussed Rosie’s pink silk ribbons delicately back to the front of her glossy curled pigtails.

_There, _now they looked like prissy-dolls.

“Honessly,” she seethed, “I dunno why you have to be late for _everythin. _We’re _goin’ _to miss our husbands_-”_

_“You _were the one who said Madam Beaux woudden leave us!” Rosie accused with a firm flap of her finger over her cart. “_And_ you took forevah to fix your stupid hair!”

“S’not stupid!” Rey shot back, “You’re mean!”

Both their flushed, rounded cheeks sparkled with fine flecks of silver glitter below the grey London morning wafting in gently beneath the portico as they faced off. They were dressed up like Miss Americas in their favorite tea dresses; Rey’s green with a sweetheart neckline, Rosie’s white with pink flowers. They’d spent _a century _rolling their tube socks just right to stuff their bras they nicked from the big girls. It took Rey forever to find a green one to pinch.

Rey always wore green. And black. And silver.

She heard they were the colors _her fiancé_ liked.

“Am not,” Rosie mumbled. She was always the first to back down. It was one of the many reasons Rey picked her to be best friends. “Your hair doesn’t look stupid.”

Rey turned her head and pouted out at the platform. She was ‘stremely sensitive about her stupid mouse-brown hair color; Madam Beaux wouldn’t let her dye it blonde like it _should be._

_Fascist._

“I promise, it looks _so _pretty,” Rosie finally offered, “loads prettier than mine.”

Rey sniffed haughtily and picked at her soft-curled ends.

“No issn’t,” she decided to be sporting. Her tummy was tingling madly, both she and Rosie were on high alert. Not just because today would be their first time to Platform nine-and-three-quarters, or because they were _finally _going to be real witches now.

It was because they hoping to run into their husbands.

Rey peeped owlishly all around the platform, trying to look without looking like she was _looking_, her trolley in a death grip as she conceded a bit mournfully to Rosie, “Prolly we shouldn’t have gotten separated from Madam Beaux…”

“Young ladies,” a _man_’s deep, formal voice drifted coolly over the pair of them.

It made her belly prickle more and float down to her feet as she looked back.

Looming over them was quite possibly the most dangerous-looking wizard she’d ever seen in her life. Towering, slender, and totally unhandsome. Dressed up like a real-life Mister Darcy from the muggle movies she and Rosie sneak-watched. His hair was severely styled and _obnoxiously _ginger, his cheek were gaunt and sharp enough to cut glass. His mouth was long like all the rest of his features, red and wet just at its seam. And his eyes-

They were_ terrifying_. Blue and electric and nearly see-through. Like the ocean struck by lightning. Too, too bright.

She felt she was burning up by looking into them. Her heart flip-flapped, she felt a clinch in the little gap between her thighs that made her flush and bite her lip without meaning to.

She lowered her eyes and prayed to all the gods and goddesses she knew he’d _go away_.

His expensive shoes stepped forward instead.

“If we do not get a move on-”

_Whoa _his voice scared her, like a Dementor roiling softly up from sparkling black pavement on a moonless night to kiss her. Like she was breaking a rule just by standing still.

“- both of you shall miss your train.”

“ ‘scuse you,” she piped back with as much attitude as she could muster. Next to her, Rosie gasped.

“We’re waiting for our fiancés,” she informed his silver filigree buttons primly.

“_Rey_!” Rosie hissed, slapping at her arm.

For some reason that made her feel a little bolder. So what if she was sassing at his chest and not his face?

“Shove off,” she told him. _Ha! Suck on that._

She saw just the corner of his lips twitch up as he folded those long, scary hands behind his back. “My my, what an insolent little mouth you have, child.”

His mouth disappeared from her periphery as he lilted his chin. “And pray, what might his name be, this… fiancé of yours?”

“Chht,” furious, chest burning, she swished her ponytail back over her shoulder and dared herself to glance him in the eye.

It made her thighs clench again and her heart race in a way she didden know if she liked.

“I don’t see how thass any of your business, you foul-”

“_Rey!”_

_Oh shit._

It was Madam Beaux back from the platform standing straight in front of their trolleys, her pretty painted nails digging into her palms inside her ostrich feather cuffs. A beautiful grown up lady with hairstyles as pretty and meticulous as her girls’, Madam Beaux’s normally cool, remote eyes were sparking murder. All the color beneath her makeup had drained off her face.

She trembled up at the wizard Rey had sassed. “Monsieur Hux-”

She curtsied deeply. “_Pardon_, pleaz. I do not know what ‘az gotten into zem-”

Wait, Monsieur_ what_-

The wizard inclined his head, “Not at all, Madam.”

Rey’s heart _pounded. _The man seemed to tower over her ten feet as all the fear she could ever feel in a lifetime poured colder than ice into her gut.

She gulped. “Mister Hu-Hux? _My _Mister Hux?”

At platform eight, a steam train _whoo-whooed _as it was pulling out of the station.

Her soul was pulling out of her body too, as he took her small, shivering hand from the trolley cart into his big one and bowed like a gentleman.

_Shit double-shit fuck-_

When their eyes were close and level, he paused and kissed her hand.

“In the flesh.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

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	2. Celebrity is as celebrity does

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Me thinks the Lady doth protest too much. 
> 
> And a new Golden Trio is formed.

“Order, order!_” _

It was Bartemius Crouch, _senior, _Supreme Magistrate and honorable judge presiding. Seated at his bench, he hovered some twenty feet in the air above the spectacle, dressed in his formidable judicial robes and smart wizard’s cap. The ends of his lampshade mustache were pulled down in a deep, disapproving frown.

He peered severely over the tops of his reading glasses at nearly three hundred thousand pureblooded witches and wizards amassed below. Their anxious prattle was deafening; the circular room they were poured into at the start made a sleek obsidian-and tile floored- drum which amplified the cacophony rather than absorbed it.

“Order!” Crouch clapped his gavel thrice then pointed his wand at this throat to enhance his nasally growl, “_I will have order in my courtroom!”_

The throng continued to clamor unencumbered in their seats within the concentric rows of the room leading up its walls. Wizarding families both great and disgraced cawing out against their fates.

The proceedings had gone on for twelve hours and families were restless, eager to leave. Many conferred among themselves and with their neighbors, utterly bewildered by the turn of events. Others were shocked into silence, a fairer few railed openly and bitterly at their lots.

But there was one wizard whose emotions were not quite so discernable. He sat mostly alone inside the high box normally reserved for the court bailiff and his Dementors; gathered together in the seats immediately surrounding him were the Darkest families of the wizarding world. Like a black mass drawing them in with its malevolent gravity, he watched the proceedings from their center, dressed as he did for all social occasions, in a set of crisp but somber dress robes and long cape.

What made him so conspicuous, so _unmistakable, _in such a drowning room, was his death-white skin and burning hair slicked religiously to his skull juxtaposed to the sea of surrounding black.

His blue eyes traveled coolly over the courtroom as beside him, his blonde companion wrung the silver head of his cane.

“This is _outrageous,_” Lucius Malfoy seethed below his breath.

_Ever the coward, _the General thought.

“As if binding us to half-breeds and _mudbloods _wasn’t degradation enough, must we also play _witnesses _to this charade? The annihilation of the pureblooded race with a single generation,” his eyes roved in lamentation around the room, “How the Dark One must be spinning in his grave.”

“I don’t know why he should be, his failure is the reason we are here now,” the General replied calmly without glancing. Rather, he could sense Lucius draw away from his sentiments. However true they were.

For it had been Riddle’s ineptitude that allowed the forces of chaos and corruption to triumph. Dumbledore and his recusant Order.

The king dissident himself was there, conducting the dissolution the entire magical world from the central floor. Making a mockery of them all in his gaudy purple and silver robes. Beside him, on a tall glass pedestal, sat his instrument of destruction. That most ridiculous, ramshackle artifact-

The Sorting Hat.

It was almost too humiliating for the General to bear.

“If you please, if you please,” the old fool raised his hands and made a motion, _settle down. _The torch lights hovering around the coliseum reflected in his many jeweled rings as well as the face of the polished black stone.

Crouch at his bench above them ceased to shout as the prattle wound down.

Dumbledore turned slowly to address them, looking up and down the rows with his wand against his throat. “I know that it has been a long, _evocative_ ceremony for us all. Today we have paired over nine hundred souls together. Nine hundred seedlings which will grow to bear that which so many of us in these darkest years have lost. _Joy. Hope. A future-”_

The General’s nostrils flared around his long-suffering sigh.

“I understand you are all _very _anxious to resume your activities and to _celebrate _amongst yourselves these most _magnificent gifts_ which so many of you have received today-”

Behind the General, Marcus Goyle snorted. Others in his immediate surroundings exchanged soft scoffs and sneers.

“- I trust that the rest of you will, in the most congratulatory spirit, _wish them well,” _Dumbledore was now facing the sliver of the room that belonged to the Dark wizards.

Thus far, not a single one of their family names had been drawn.

He seemed to be speaking directly up at the General as he continued, “Therefore, it is my privilege and pleasure to announce the final three couples to be wed-”

“Finally,” Lucius was back to murmuring at the General’s shoulder as Dumbledore turned to consort with the Sorting Hat. “It does appear as if _our side _shall emerge from this debauchery unscathed, thank the gods. Although. One does regret missing the opportunity for a _sanctioned _little mudblood slave. Can you imagine the delights?”

The General’s eye ticked; he had little regard for the sullied brethren who indulged themselves in their muggle, mixed-blood and muggleborn victims. Rape was not among his appetites, and he would sooner lie with a swine.

He did not acknowledge Lucius as Dumbledore read the first of the last three names aloud.

“Seamus. Finnigan.”

He fed the slip of parchment on which the name was written into the torn seam-mouth of the Sorting Hat.

On its glass perch, the hat mulled it, murmuring to itself at a distance too great for the General to hear as it thought.

At last, it piped out in its reedy rasp, _“Luna Lovegood!”_

“Congratulations to you both, Luna and Xenophilius Lovegood,” as if he knew just where to find them, Dumbledore made a graceful turn and bowed deeply, with a roll of his glimmering arm trailing fabric, to a tall blonde wizard seated near the midsection. There were a great many jeers and murmurs and just a smattering of applause.

The blonde wizard Xenophilius held a swaddled baby in his arms. He looked positively _serene _about his future mottled grandchildren.

The General’s lip curled with disgust.

“Second to last we have-” Dumbledore coaxed yet another slip of parchment from his sleeve, “yes. Rose. Tico.”

He fed her name into the hat.

It considered not three seconds before it shrilled, _“George Weasley-”_

“Ah, congratulations to you, Mister-”

_“- and Frederick Weasley!”_

It was the General’s turn to snort, “absolute circus” as the murmurs crescendoed to outcry.

In their section much further up from Xenophilius and his wee babe, the Weasley’s were huddled as a clan, recognizable instantly by their shabby dress and obnoxious hair. The broodmare, Molly Weasley, was sputtering indignation as her husband, Arthur, wrung his muggle’s cap in his ruddy hands and looked all around. The boys in question – Fredrick and George – wore identical tranquil smirks.

“A plural marriage? Good _gods_,” Lucius was scandalized.

“It appears the Weasley boys have been paired with muggleborns and half-breeds, every one of them,” the General observed coldly.

“Old Arthur must be happy as a pig in muck. Filthy muggle-lover.” Lucius wrung his cane.

“Mm yes, and just think- if the sons prove anywhere near as prolific, in twenty years their tainted litters will overrun us all.”

“Perish the thought.”

“Congratulations, congratulations,” Dumbledore was pacifying the masses with his soft voice and even-keel, “Congratulations to you both. As we in our hearts well know, love is never divisive. Rather, it conveys the power to multiply-”

The General muttered, “Yes, I believe the Weasleys are already well aware-”

Lucius sniggered meanly into his glove.

“The last name I have here is-” Dumbledore did not have to tease this slip of parchment from his sleeve, as he did the others. This one slid into his pursed fingertips as if by-

_Magic._

The General felt… _compelled_ to watch as Dumbledore spoke it without having to read.

“Rey,” the name unfurled from his lips like a flower. He added cheerily, “No surname.”

Lucius said something cruel-toned that the General did not register as the name – her name – _Rey_ – was slipped into the hat.

As if he were underwater, everything blurred and dulled and wound down to nothing.

Everything except the dulcet, suede beat of his heart.

Which wizard’s name the Sorting Hat shrilled he did not hear. He was up, up on his feet at the row’s short black wall before he remembered he knew how to stand.

For the first time since they gathered, the coliseum full of three hundred thousand witches and wizards fell silent. Its sliver of Dark-hearted families most of all.

The General did not notice; he was looking down into the face of that conniving old rebel.

Dumbledore’s warmer, brighter eyes twinkled back.

“Congratulations, General Hux,” he said.

The walk through brick and across the crowded platform was a grey-toned, watercolor nightmare. All the sights and sounds she should have savored – white steam roiling through the pristine wheels of the train cars, beautiful owls of every color and kind gathered together in arched dome cages, mummies and daddies hugging their baby witches and wizards goodbye_ – _all of it was too soft-focus to witness. The scenes slipped like silver threads through her shivering fingers.

Half of which he still held in his hand.

_He’s not right he’s wrong this is wrong-_

By the time he escorted her to one of the petite cabin towards the middle of the train, crowded in behind her to let others pass by from the opposite direction, his long hard arm wrapped loosely about her middle, still – _still – _holding onto her hand, she was inna full blown panic. His mouth near her ear murmuring instructions made her heart shrill and her belly clinch below its button. She couldn’t even struggle as he all but picked her up and set her in her seat like he was nestling a kitten into a scarf-lined drawer. She was frozen solid, too scared to breathe.

_This is wrongallwrongthisiswrong-_

He shut the cabin door, sealing them off.

“There we are,” he took off his caplet, a heavy black satin that revealed a two-tone damask pattern when it shifted under the light, and glided it around her shoulders. It was her right size by the time he was finished fashioning the silver clasp.

Warm and scented lightly with his cologne, he tucked it in about her lap. “Nicely settled. Are you hungry? Would you like something to eat?”

“Where’s Rosie?” she blurted, mouth shaking. This man was taller than a mountain with him standing over her and her sitting down. “I want to see Madam Beaux. This is- this a bad mistake-”

She felt faint as he knelt down.

“Not quite what you were expecting,” he smiled sympathetically, just a quarter-smile. It might have been a bit self-deprecating, except that he laid his big hand on her knee over her dress skirt and that made her jolt.

“Don’t!”

“It’s alright,” his face in shadow was even more angular, but his blue eyes were every bit as bright in low light as he told her softly, “I won’t harm you. I only want to talk-”

Again, he tried coaxing her hand from her lap.

“Stop it!” she squirmed desperately. She noticed that the little gusset of her tights was… somehow slippery.

Hot.

She didn’t know why, just that it made her shameful. She blushed, shrinking away from him against the backboard with her hands curled together against her tube sock breasts.

“I mean it,” she bared her teeth, “quit taking my hand!”

“Fair enough.” He gave her a close-lipped smile and draped his forearm over his thigh parallel to the rug. The other held loosely onto his hip, holding back his rich, dark robes to the show the strong, sleek shape of him. Below the soft glow of the cabin light, his hair was the color of setting sunlight striking white snow.

Why- why couldn’t she breathe when she looked at him?

He tipped his chin and asked curiously, “You really don’t remember me, do you?”

Her long, loose curls scattered over her shoulder as she shook her head. “Nm-no…”

“Pity,” his gaze roamed her, lingering on her bright eyes and small fingers with sparkling silver nails. He seemed to be counting the freckles between the glitter flecks on her cheeks as he mused kindly, “Though perhaps I should have known. For such a little girl, five years is a very long time…”

His words made her ache the way she did when the other girls at Madam Beaux’s hugged their families in foyer while she watched alone from the top of the stairs.

_Stupid, nobody wants you-_

“You know-”

Like he was letting her in on a big secret, he leaned closer over his thigh, “The last time I saw you, you were clinging onto my robes and begging me not to go.”

“I never,” she spat, aiming for outraged and landing up somewhere near breathless. She was so, so slippery between her thighs. Burning up. Her body buzzed like it was wrapped in smooth static. Like she was swimming in warm-crackling, electric blue light.

_But why? _

“Oh yes. You were so sweet, so _insistent_. I very nearly changed my mind,” his words ghosted over her face, warm and smelling like peppermint. He sighed, “Alas. But we’re here now. And look at you-”

She tried not to blush, not to squirm, not to _breathe _as his gaze drifted over her again.

“Pretty as a picture. Dressed up like a little confection. I’ve never seen anything so tempting,” his voice felt nearer, like it was rumbling from inside her.

She couldn’t help focusing on his lips as he murmured, “I could eat you up.”

_Oh, _her belly swooped wildly. She hid her fists beneath her chin, pressing her little sock-breasts together over her mad skipping heart as the hot, tender slit between her legs _gulped_.

“But that would hurt,” she mewed.

He laughed, the soft velvet rumble of rocks tumbling down a dark mountain in the far-off.

“Oh my sweeting,” instantly the love-name called her back to vague, underwater memories of candlelit feedings and tinkling bathwater and firm lips pressing chaste kisses along her cheeks and into her hair. “How I have missed you…”

His eyes traced her face as his hands fisted against his thighs. “You cannot know how many times I-”

“Beggin’ your pardon, gov’ner!”

A kind-looking crone hunched over her sweets cart in the corridor held their cabin door open with one gnarled hand. Her small eyes were very careful to avoid the wizard’s face as she crowed gaily, “Train’s about to depart!”

As if to corroborate, the whistle wailed suddenly, three short, shrill pipes.

The change in his expression was subtle but deadly. His eyes narrowed, muscle ticking as behind his closed lips his jaw slid side-to-side.

Rey’s heart tripped for the crone as he enunciated coldly, “Just a moment, thank you.”

“But sir, the Express waits for no man-”

“_One moment_.” He raised his hand.

Slowly, without looking, he drew the door closed.

_Wandless magic._

Even _she _knew that was very, very rare.

“I must apologize to you,” again he fisted his white hands against his dark thighs. Inside the closed cabin, he seemed more desperate than dangerous. “Nothing has gone as I intended. I fear I’ve-”

“No,” she found her voice finally. It was small, and scared. But firm. “Don’t say anthin’, just go. Go away and don’t come back.”

“Rey, my angel-”

She shook her head. “_Don’t _call me that. I’m _not_ your angel, or your- sweeting.” Her chest burned. She wanted to sob. “And I’m not your fiancé, neither. So _go.”_

He didn’t say anything as he stood smoothly and opened the compartment door.

The crone was still there, looking even more nervous. She spared Rey a comforting smile before she gestured, “Anyfin from the trolley for your little one ‘fore we go?”

Wordlessly, her wizard reached his elegant fingers inside the breast of his robes then dropped a small purseful of coins on her cart.

He took one last look before moving silently down the corridor and out of sight.

Rey shifted in her seat to press her cheek to the glass and watch him until he disappeared into the next car.

“Ah, looks like he bought the lot with change to spare. Lucky girl.”

Her lip wobbled, she raked up her haul as gracefully as she could while straining over her shoulder the whole time to catch even a glimpse of him on the platform down below. Her heart was grieving. Maybe because she was mean to him. Maybe because he was a man and frightening and she _didn’t _want to marry him.

Maybe because it would kill her to go-

“Rey, _there _you are!” it was Rosie, worried but shining.

She threw herself into the seat across from her as the train lurched and garbled from its edge, “I thought that nasty git might have taken you- _whoa_. Cool! Did you buy all this? Madam Beaux’s gonna kill you when she finds out. Can I have the frogs?”

Rey burst into tears.

“It’s not _so _bad, is it?” at the banquet table beneath the long, billowing red-and-gold banners, Rosie was delicately spooning up her fourth helping of sugar-brandied plums.

Rey’s lip quivered. Her eyes were red and still wet; she had wept nearly the entire journey by train and halfway through the boat ride. It wasn’t until she was standing at the foot of the majestic marble staircase lit with a thousand floating candles fretting over the Sorting that she forgot to be distraught.

But then that stupid dreadful hat went and put her in Gryffindor when she was obv’usly a _Slytherin_, and now she _really _wanted to die.

“I hate this House,” she warbled brokenly, pushing her untouched slice of fruit tart about her dessert plate with her fork. The feast table was loaded with all sorts of desserts she’d never seen before, like something out of the glossy cooking pages of _Witches Weekly, _all glistening and beautiful and multi-tiered. “And I _hate _my husband! He’s rude and he’s ugly and he’s _ancient-” _

She stabbed ruthlessly at her tart.

“Fee’s noff fanfient,” Rosie said through a bite of glittering sauced plum. She swallowed. “But he is kinda old.”

“He’s _decrepit,” _Rey hoped she was using that word right. “And he’s mean and stupid and I’m not marrying him. I’m _not!”_

She slammed her fork.

A bit further along the great wooden table on the other side, a pair of gangly fifth year rooster-boys were staring at them. They had almost the same horrible hair color as Rey’s _whatevah, _only it was wild and a bit more obnoxiously orange. They were whispering to one another as they flicked balled-up nips of bread to hit Rosie gently on the nose.

Rosie huffed and slapped her spoon down and screeched, “_Stop it!”_

They grinned and cooed back in unison, “Wotcher.”

She rolled her eyes.

“I hate boys,” she said primly to Rey, “Lease _you _get someone maturely. I don’t even know who my husband is yet. But I bet he’s stupid, and ‘nnoying.” She sighed down at her plums, then perked back up. “But yours looked super rich-”

Rey puddled her cheek in her hand. Fresh, fat tears rolled down her cheeks and plinked to her plate as she whimpered, “I juss wanna go home…”

“I’m sorry, whom are you not marrying?” a dreamy voice whisper-sang from her left.

She glanced at the girl – a pale, ethereal blonde with soft doe-eyes and Saturn planet earrings. She sniffled. The girl _was _a little pretty, if totally strange.

Rey decided she would talk to her.

“My husband, thass who,” she sank her cheek deeper into her palm as she told her grimly, “Mister Armitage Brendol Hux.”

Immediately, all the chatter around her died down.

“_Who _did she say?” someone whispered.

“Not _him, _surely-”

“But she’s muggleborn!”

“No it’s true, I saw them together. He was on the train…”

The whispers fanned their way down the table. Rosie’s pair of rooster-boys with orange combs both stopped smiling and watched Rey intensely. Like everyone else staring at her, they looked very serious, and even a little afraid.

Rey sat up and looked around. “What? Why’s everybody whisperin’? _What?_”

“Because, silly nargle,” the serene little witch to her left swept her hair back over her shoulder in somewhat slow-motion.

“He’s a Deatheater.”

The walk to Gryffindor Tower was even worse than the one to train.

The others all whispered and watched her from a careful distance inside the corridors and on the staircases, as if she might suddenly explode. Even the portraits hung leagues high up the walls to almost the ceiling avoided looking at her directly as she passed. Only Rosie and the looney girl – Luna – would walk with her.

She felt ugly and loneful. And angry.

This was all stupid Armitage’s fault.

The dormitory was old and hideous, perched atop a spiral flight of stairs and just wide enough to hold three four-poster beds. The curtains were gaudy red and gold tapestry, the bedspread a loveworn burgundy brocade. At first glance Rey felt yet another bout of mournful sobbing well up inside her chest.

All her beautiful dark dreams of glinting silver and emerald green had been completely dashed.

What would she do with all her Slytherin clothes and hair bows now?

“Look!” Rosie cried at the same time Rey saw what she was squealing at.

In the center of their little bedroom sat a rosewood pedestal with braided wood legs. Piled on it was a mound of roses so thick they eclipsed their vase. They were lush, sumptuous and fragrant. Velvet soft and deep blood red. Propped beneath them was a large satin box and a cream-colored envelope.

Her small fingers shook as they plucked up the note.

_Rey, _it said in graceful script on its face. When she turned it to catch the lamp light, the black wax seal on its back read _ABH. _

“It’s chocolates!” piped Rosie, having already torn into the box.

Luna hummed like a mermaid contemplating a seashell. “Oh Merkins, very expensive.”

Out-loud she pondered, “Are all Deatheaters so rich?”

“Wh-who gives a fig?” Rey tried to sound haughty and scornful. Inside, her heart knocked against her ribs.

While her two friends crinkled away the beautiful vellum wrappings around her bonbons, she dug her quivering fingertips beneath the letter’s wax seal.

No sooner had she broken it then the envelope swept up crisply from her grip into the air directly in front of her and cleared its throat. With its flap, it made a proper mouth.

_“Good evening, my lady.”_

Instantly, she recognized his voice.

Her cheeks flamed and her belly crackled warmly despite the way she hugged herself. On the other side of the rose heap, Rosie and Luna stopped stuffing themselves and watched the letter bow.

_“First and foremost, allow me to apologize. Our meeting today on Platform nine-and-three-quarters went not at all as I intended. I fear I have offended you, and frightened you, and for that I am deeply sorry-”_

“Why’s he talk like that?” asked Rosie with brown chocolate ringed around her mouth.

“Oh my gods,” Rey mewled miserably as she covered her head with her hands, “he’s a total weirdo-”

“He’s a nobleman,” Luna touched her breast and sighed.

_“Please allow me the privilege of your company this Thursday in the observatory at noon. I will arrange for a chaperone with your Head of House, Severus Snape, so that you may feel more at ease-”_

Rosie’s brow furrowed. “Severus Snape?”

“He thinks I got sorted into Slytherin,” Rey clapped her eyes and moaned. She felt sick – _sick –_ like she’d disappointed him already.

But she hated him.

But she wanted him to be… proud.

She couldn’t look at all the _hideous _red and gold as she berated herself, _stupid stupid ugly loser stupid-_

_“I do not expect you will reply. Please, accept these small tokens as gesture of my… Rey-”_

Her heart skipped as he said her name.

_“There is so much I want to tell you. To explain. Until Thursday. Your- Forever yours, Armitage.”_

The letter coiled elegantly with a gentle, soft-flickering flame. It left a warm, woodsy scent behind it, like cologne.

_Dream of me, girl, _she heard his voice whisper. But that was impossible, because the letter was gone.

“Mm, you have a date,” purred Luna, looking wistful with her arm hugging one of the posters of her bed.

“Well I’m not going,” Rey snapped, trying to ignoring the sensual cocktail of incense and roses and chocolates and- and-

“Obv’usly, I hate him.” She climbed onto the bed opposite Luna and crossed her arms.

“Here, have one,” Rosie offered her the box of half-devoured bonbons. Her face was sympathetic, but resigned.

_You know the Law, _it said.

Rey’s lip trembled. She was so tired of crying, and it was _only _her first night away.

She bit into a sweet – white chocolate with a strawberry crème center – and hugged her knees and promised herself somehow she’d sort it all out…

Back inside his manor on his great estate in Derbyshire County, the General wasn’t fairing much better. He was seated before the hearth inside his private study, the very one he stepped through on the night he met his-

_Well._

He raised his fine china cup of strong coffee from the black lacquered table alongside his armchair and considered the flames over its delicate rim. He detested alcohol and most of the wizards who consumed it habitually; he kept downstairs in the kitchens only those spirits his female company preferred.

Bella, in particular, was partial to dark cherry wine.

The fire lapped bright gold across the surface of his pale, cold eyes as he sipped at his coffee and considered what a damnable mess he’d made of his meeting with Rey.

_Pretty, pretty Rey._

Dressed like a muggle film star from their old black-and-white pictures, with her long soft-curled hair he wanted to feel slip between his fingers and her charming sock-stuffed chest. Star-bright brown eyes and a small strawberry mouth, she’d smelled sweet and feminine inside their intimate cabin, like fresh florals and sparkling sugar. Tiny as a kitten and infinitely delicate, he glimpsed her little pink tongue rolling around her mouth whenever she spoke. Such a dazzling, strong-willed child.

How he ached to correct her tone.

_Useless instinct_, he reminded himself sharply. His mind and the mark he bore knew the truth of the matter; he would not sully himself by taking an _impure one _for a wife_, _never mind how lovely she was. The girl was his charge to keep until she came of age and could make her own way. He was merely her patron, and a staunch advocate and prudent counsel, should she require either.

Nothing more.

His owl crooing softly at the leaded-pane window roused him from wandering too far down that garden path. It carried a small standard letter with a green wax seal clinched in its claw.

He craned over the smartly upholstered back of the armchair and raised his hand not holding his cup. He flicked his fingers, and the latch undid itself so that the glimmering halves of the window swung out to greet the night.

“Come in, Cyrus,” he called quietly.

The pharaoh eagle-owl swooped in as silent as a shadow and landed on the back of the armchair above his shoulder. Its tawny feathers where spotted like a leopard’s; it shook itself and arranged its wings as the General took the burden from its claw.

With a few more complex movements of his fingers and a few barely-whispered words, the message rose from his palm and read itself aloud.

_“Hux,” _it addressed him curtly. He recognized the droll monotone at once as Severus Snape’s.

The greatest traitor of them all.

_“I received your messages as well as the packages which you forwarded for your ward. However, I **regret **to inform you-” _rather, Snape sounded _delighted _to be telling him, _“that Miss Rey of the House of Hux was not sorted into Slytherin House, but rather-”_

A devious pause.

_“Gryffindor.”_

The General slammed his china cup on the lacquer table so forcefully its handle snapped off.

“Impossible,” he snarled.

_“-therefore I have sent along your **suitor’s gifts **to the office of Professor Minerva McGonagall, whom you will find is Head of Gryffindor House. If you have any further questions regarding the… nurturing of your child bride, Professor McGonagall may be reached by owl. Have an evening. Snape.”_

“This is outrageous,” the General snatched the letter hovering smirking in his fist and hurled it into the fire.

It landed with a sizzling shower of cinder and seemed to snicker as it burned to ash.

Of all the trickery. Of all the _insult-_

Summoning wandlessly his letterhead and quill, he swept his robetails aside and sat down at the small walnut secretary in the corner of his study.

He would express his displeasure by hand.

_To Professor McGonagall- _

Fury raked cold sparks across his chest as he penned swiftly, _I demand an audience with you and your Headmaster at once. It is a matter concerning my wife-_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you are delighted by this story, click the Kudos button and leave a comment down below!
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	3. Books can be misleading...

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Myths. Magic. Cunnilingus.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So. One quick thing.
> 
> This is *very* underage fantasy. I want to warn you right up front. If this kind of content disturbs, upsets, or triggers you - please. Baby, please. Click out of this and do something kind for yourself. I care about you and I want you to have fun and enjoy what you're reading. If that is not this, please scoot on out.
> 
> Sorry I've been away a while. I've been a bit low lately. But writing this has pepped me up : )
> 
> Love you guys <3

“Honessly-”

At the foot of a weathered staircase in some cavernous spiral tower, in gods-only-knew which wing of the castle, Rosie notched her fists on her hips and stamped her strappy heeled sandal.

Her pigtails flounced.

“Doesn’t this place ever stand still for one second!”

Beside her, in a black velvet dress with a low neckline and nipped waist and poof skirt that barely kissed her bottom, a green satin sash and bow tied round her pony tail to match, Rey crossed her arms over her chest and cracked her tongue. “Chht, nevah. Stupid stairways…”

On the other side of Rose, Luna swayed dreamily up at the domed ceilings. Her lace cat-ear headband had slipped back slightly along her white-blonde waves. “I think we’re going in circles. Or maybe… that fresco is circling us?”

She made a paw with her hand and waved to it.

“Gods, we’re never gonna find it,” Rey covered her eyes. On her fingers were many pretty silver and white gold rings set with sparkling faux-emeralds. She had bought with her ‘llowances back when she thought she’d be a Slytherin. When she thought her husband would be handsome, not-evil.

_Young_.

It was Wednesday afternoon and they had a free period before supper; they were using it to search _desperately _for the library. They’d just come from double-Potions with Professor Snape down in the dungeons; he was so beasly they didn’t dare ask him the way up to the third floor.

Snape _hated _Gryffindors, and it seemed he hated Rey especially. When he got to her name during rollcall – _Rey, of the House of Hux – _he paused to give her the cruelest smile she’d ever seen in her life. _“Ah, Lady Hux. Our new **celebrity**.”_

That’s when girls decided right then and there over their smoldering cauldrons that they would go to the library ‘mediately and find everything they could about the wizard who was ruining Rey’s life. _And_ how she could get divorced to him_._

Cept for now they were totally lost.

“What if I just poison him?” she mewled miserably with her red mouth peeking through the frame her wrists made. “You heard Snape, I could learn to put a stopper in death-”

“Yeah but prolly not _this year,” _Rosie peeled Rey’s hands off her eyes and laced their fingers together. Her expression was worried, and soft. “Anyway you heard him, we’re bound to be rubbish. Didn’t he say potions are like, _really_ hard?”

“Not nearly as hard as solving the riddles of a French quarry-gnome,” Luna interjected helpfully. She was chasing slowly the dazzling flecks of dust floating inside the bands of sunlight streaming through the long crystal windows.

“Lu-nah, be serious,” Rey really tried not to smile as she touched foreheads with Rose. “Suppose I could drown myself in the lake-”

“Ooo, or become a mermaid!” Luna chirped.

The girls giggled until a startling rooster-voice cockadoodled, “Oy oy, hands off our bird!”

“Oh no,” Rosie groaned sideways at the two tall weasel boys waltzing grinning up the hallway. Ever since the Sorting on Saturday, they’d been popping up all over – before and after classes, on the stairwells headed back to commons, outside the lavatories even – to try to get a rise out of Rose.

“Kill me-” George – at least, Rey _thought _it might be George – swept Rosie up, up and away before she could finish, “-now.”

“ ‘lo, poppet,” he popped Rose up onto one of the wide stone window sills so that they were almost the same height. It was slanted slightly; she had to hold onto his shoulders so that she didn’t slip off. He tried rubbing noses with her, big hands holding steady round her small waist, as his brother slid in at his side.

“I’m not your girlfriend!” Rosie screeched and flapped and turned her face away. Just in time for Fred – Rey was almost _positive_ that one was Fred – to peck her on the lips.

“Ew, gross!” she squealed and wiped her mouth on her forearm. “You taste like licorice!”

They smirked.

“Aren’t you a pretty bitty,” the boys chorused as her waist changed pairs of big freckled hands. Both their bright eyes lingered over the plunging neck of her white summer dress and on her creamy, rounded thighs peeking out her short skirt.

It was warm outside, a perfect day for a dinner-picnic well away from the Whomping Willow. Which was exactly what the girls planned to do if they ever got their books from the library.

Luna was wearing a gauzy set of black robes tied flatteringly to her body with a silk cord like a Grecian goddess. She wore lace cat ears and dark kitty-eye makeup to match.

Rosie wriggled but couldn’t squirm away from the Weasley boys petting her tenderly, so Rey squawked and lunged to take a swipe at one of them with her long dark nails. “She said _go ‘way, _stupid! We’re busy.”

Fred – she guessed he was – dodged her as he cooed at Rosie, “Whass the matter, beauty? Are you lost?”

“We can help you,” George waggled his eyebrows, “tell us where you want to go and we’ll take you there.”

“Yeah Rosie, we’ll take you anywhere.”

Rosie snorted primly, “Oh really? Well how ‘bout you both go tah hell?”

“Ooo, she’s a mean one,” Fred stole another smacking kiss as George tickled her belly, “We love a girl who’ll take the mickey out of us.”

“Chut up,” Rosie was trying very hard not to smile. Luna purred and pretended to lick her arm.

“We’re lookin’ for the library,” Rey knitted her bejeweled fingers and looked at them both from beneath her lashes. “Do you know where that is?”

“Course we do,” Fred puffed up proudly as George paused sneaking his hand up Rosie’s skirt to nod. “S’easy. But why you wanna go there?”

“Yeah, come outside with us, Rosie,” George wheedled.

Fred gave her his big weasel-pup eyes. “Pleeease? You can bring Tweedle Strange and Tweedle Deatheater’s wife, if you like-”

“Hey!” Rey balled up her hands and flushed furiously as Luna hopped delicately with her tongue out to catch the floating specks of mica in the air.

“_No_!” Rosie flapped her finger between their faces now very close to hers. The boys stared as if she’d hung the moon as she demanded, “I wanna go to the library with my friends! Now take us there you lot, or I’m never speakin’ to either of you again!”

“Alright, alright beauty,” Fred caught her beneath her arms and swung her down off the sill.

She tottered on her heels just before George squatted down in front of her and reached back behind himself to hoist her up. “C’mon poppet, up yah go then-”

She clapped her arms about his neck squealing, short skirt flouncing as he hiked her up his back in a way that would have made Madam Beaux clutch her pearls. Luna laughed and started meowing a song about cats and fiddles and cows jumping. Rosie beamed triumph-ful and so did Rey until she remembered the dark older wizard she met on the train.

Then her heart ached.

She prayed to all the gods Rosie and Luna’s husbands weren’t like Armitage.

“I _am_ muggleborn, thank you,” Rose was informing the twins primly, holding tightly onto George as they all started off together down the hall, “so I have a fiancé.”

The brothers glanced smirking at one another and said in unison, “We know.”

Rey stayed back a bit behind the three of them, rubbing her chest as the memory of Armitage and his love flowers stole her warmth away. All her life that she could remember, she’d dreamed of having a cool boyfriend who worshipped her.

Now she had a cold man who hated her guts.

“Don’t you just love black-cat Wednesdays?” Luna came and slipped her arm into the crook of Rey’s and laid her temple on her shoulder. She purred as they walked.

Rey turned her cheek and kissed the top of Luna’s pale hair and smiled. “Yeah, guess they’re cool.”

Rey slammed her _one hundredth _tome closed and dropped her head against it. She sprawled her arms on the study table and wailed, “This is pointless!”

A sixth-year girl in ugly glasses at the end of the table turned her head and hissed, “Shhh!”

Rosie stuck out her tongue at her, then she sighed. She sat across from Rey, perched on Fred’s lap, pouring diligently over books about bonding ceremonies and magical law between bouts of delighted smothered giggles at the origami animals George animated for her.

“Yeah, s’like tryin’ to read a different language with this lot,” she turned another large papyrus reed page of an ancient law tomb with a painted fingernail and sighed again.

“Oh, but that _is _a different language, Rose,” Luna piped in her sweet, musical squeak. “It’s Greek.”

“Is it really?” Rosie dragged the tomb closer to her and squinted suspiciously at the page. A white paper crane on her shoulder the size of Rey’s thumb trilled and cricked its neck to peer with her. “Well I wondered…”

Rey growled into the cover of _Magical Marriage Precedents between the Middle and Victorian Ages _as the homely girl tried to shush them all again.

“Oy, here’s something-”

It was George, hunched gangly and inelegant over a smaller, newer-looking text. “It’s got nothin’ to do with marriage laws, but it _is _about- well,” he eyed Rey frownfully, “Him.”

Her heart began to beat faster. She sat up and payed strict attention, hardly noticing George’s nose was rather beakish, or that there was a tiny paper tiger pacing the table in front of him and pausing intermittently to let out a teacup roar as he read:

_“Lord Armitage Brendol Hux - known as the General, Death’s Star, and the Destroyer – is the sixty-second heir to the House of Hux, which is rumored to trace its lineage back to the Arkani-”_

“Blimey,” breathed Luna.

“Wassa our-canni?” Rey pawed back her fringe.

“The _Arkani,” _Fred exchanged dark looks with his brother as he bounced Rosie idly on his knee. His arm wound protectively around her waist._ “_They were a group of witches a long time ago who, er… _bonded _themselves to dragons. Supposedly,” he added.

“Bonded to dragons?” Rey crinkled her nose. “How?”

George made a face. “Trust us, you don’t wanna know.”

“They’re extremely powerful,” Luna mused up at the candles floating above them. Her black cat headband slipped back over her pale hair again. “They can’t use wands because their magic shatters them.”

Rey thought about Armitage closing the door to their carriage and changing the size of his longcloak to fit her, all with his bare hands.

But was he really descended from dragons?

“That’s just a myth,” George scoffed, until Rey shook her head.

“It isn’t. I’ve seen him do it – magic with no words or wand. Just his hands.”

The boys passed another bleak look between them.

“What else s’it say?” Rosie nudged George’s arm. On her shoulder, the little paper crane was nestling down into the ends of her pigtail.

George hesitated. “Well…”

Rey strained up through her tiptoes and leaned on her arms over the table, trying to catch a glimpse of the book.

On the left page, she could see the upside-down, black-and-white impression of her… _whatever _standing tall and proud with his chin lilted, hands behind his back. He was wearing a sort of dark uniform with a long row of silver buttons and medals twinkling on his chest. He looked very young in the photograph. Arrogant.

_Gorgeous_.

On the opposite page, there was a later picture of him. He was being led down the steps of the Ministry by bailiffs, his hands not clasped loosely behind him but tied up in chains. He looked solemn, haunted and gaunt.

“Was he arrested?” she piped, chewing at her lip. The thought made her tummy twist into knots.

Fred and George exchanged another set of nervous glances, as beside her, Luna looped her arm comfortingly around her waist.

“You really don’t know who he is, do you?” Fred looked worried, and sad.

“Come out with it!” Rey slapped her hand on the table. She made a mad snatch for the text, “Why won‘t you lot tell me- just give it to me and I’ll read it myself!”

The plain girl at the end of the table slammed her book and stood.

“Honestly!” she whispered venomously at them.

George turned to tell her off and Rey grabbed the book.

“Rey, don’t,” Luna sang sadly.

“Whassit say?” Rosie asked.

The line that caught Rey’s eye broke her heart.

_A suspected associate of He Who Shall Not Be Named, Lord Hux was implicated but never convicted for the killing of over seven hundred muggle-born witches and wizards, witches and wizards of inter-magical parentage, and those who supported intermarriage with muggles-_

Heart pounding and tummy churning flip-flaps, she read shakily aloud, “He was taken into custody but his accusers all disappeared before he could stand trial. Due to extenuating circumstances during his incarceration in Azkaban Prison, he was released and all charges were withdrawn.”

“Extenuating circumstances?” Luna mused curiously. Across the table, Rosie’s eyes were frightened and huge.

“Yeah,” Fred sounded hollow, far away to Rey through the bells ringing in her ears, “Dad said the Dementors were afraid of him. Told their handlers either he had to leave Azkaban, or they would.”

_Dementors. Dragons. Seven hundred dead-_

Her husband’s pale, angular face stared up smugly at her from the page.

“Rey, wait!” cried Rosie.

But she was already past the end of the table and in the library’s main corridor, running as fast as she could as she sobbed.

“This is _egregious_.”

Between a pair of overstuffed chairs angled before a great claw-footed desk, the General loomed like a dark spire. He was dressed in his usual longcloak and sharp imperial black. He looked very much out of place amongst all the glimmering, tinkling oddities crammed gaudily onto every surface around the circular room. The paintings in their lavish frames gawked at him from their standing easels and from the walls. All except for the portrait of the Headmaster himself, which blinked bemusedly around the room as if he had no idea where he was.

But the General’s wrath was reserved for only one artifact in particular. His magic sizzled around him, making the air crackle and shimmer as if above a raging fire. He clenched his fists behind his back so hard they wrung their leather and snarled lowly, baring his glinting white teeth, “That _thing _is a menace-”

The object he referred to sat old and tatty on a shelf safely behind the Headmaster.

The Sorting Hat.

“You have bewitched it to do your bidding,” the General’s enunciation had never been sharper, or more furious, “Give it to me. _Now_.”

“Armitage, please. Calm yourself,” the Headmaster had the gall to use his first name. Reclining in a tall, tufted pale-lavender seat behind the desk, Dumbledore smiled and gestured with a sweep of his long sleeve, “Sit down. Enjoy a jelly bean-”

As swift as an asp’s strike, the General backhanded the crystal candy dish to the floor. It hit the chintz carpeting and shattered, scattering crystal shards and candy beans of every color across the rug.

“General!” at the Headmaster’s side standing straight as a ruler with her hands folded in front of her, Minerva McGonagall gave the General a look that could melt ice.

Yet he did not miss the way her fingers shook as she implored him imperiously, “If not for your sake, then for Lady Rey’s_, _I insist you stop with these baseless accusations _at once_.”

The General ignored her. He planted his gloved hands on the desk and bore down slowly on the Headmaster like a chuffing beast, “_You _contrived that shamble of a ceremony to bind me to that girl, knowing full-well what I am-”

The Headmaster smiled blithely.

The General dropped his voice to a deadly rumble, “- and I will not allow you to sort her now where she will be surrounded by talentless, showboating delinquents-”

McGonagall blustered, “I beg your pardon!”

“Oh?” the General turned his tightly-reigned fury on her, “You dare contradict me, when the degree to which you acquiesce to disorder among your students is legendary, _madam_?”

“I most certainly do!”

“I can assure you, General, I can assure you,” the Headmaster inserted himself as cheerfully as if he were suggesting pudding for dessert, “Professor McGonagall is held in the utmost regard by her pupils. Furthermore,” he regarded the General a bit more seriously over the tops of his half-moon glasses, “there has been no tampering with Lady Hux’s sorting. Of any kind. She is your bride, and she is a Gryffindor.”

His blue eyes twinkled, “Circumstances which will make for many lively dinner conversations, I am sure.”

In his corner amongst the shadows, the Head of Slytherin House snorted.

The General’s jaw ticked. He straightened, allowing his magic to gather dark and kinetic around him, like heat sizzling warningly around a dragon’s maw. “I see-”

Rey’s heart pattered, her heels click-clattered against the stone floors as she raced blindly down long-winding staircases and through cavernous halls. She wanted – no, _had _– to see the Headmaster. He was supposably the most powerful wizard alive.

If anyone could unsort her marriage to Armitage the monster, it was Albus Dumbledore.

“Please!” she cried at the walls and paintings and suits of armor. They must have heard her, because she felt led by something unseen through the corridors. A red string from her aching heart to someplace up ahead. Her ears drummed, her breath came in wet, shallow gasps as she galloped until at last her race ended in a tall, narrow hall lit by torches inside their arched recesses.

Their yellow flickering light drew a line down to the end where an enormous stone gargoyle waited in fierce repose.

The pull on her heart grew stronger as she followed the light of the torches. Its beat grew slower and slower, yet louder and louder; she had the sensation of floating towards the gargoyle at the end of the hall.

When finally she as near enough she could have reached up on her tiptoes and touched its snout, she heard a muffled voice.

“So this is your retribution-”

It was _him_. Her husband.

He was speaking from somewhere behind and above the stone.

Her pulse scrambled; as if in a trance, she pressed herself tentatively against the fierce-looking statute. Her ear turned toward the cold, rough stone. Swallowing, she closed her eyes.

His voice rumbled deep down in her belly as he spoke.

“You mean to sequester my bride from me. Do you really think you turn her against me? That you can poison her heart-”

A sort of dreaminess washed over her. It smothered her heartache, made her yearn for something… _warm_.

“My dear boy,” it was her Headmaster, she recognized his serene unmistakable rasp, “you may see your sweetheart any time you like.”

“Oh of that there was never any question- I _will_ see her. You cannot deny me that-”

Her chest ached and fluttered. She had to bite her lip to stop its trembling as fat, fresh tears slipped softly through her lashes and raced each other sparkling down her cheeks.

Armitage didn’t want them to be apart…

“Why should we wish to? No no, the wards that surround this school which dissuade intruders will not detain you,” her Headmaster continued, “the magic that binds your souls is very old. Very old indeed. There is no spell known to man or beast which can keep you apart.”

She could picture him perfectly – her husband – his long, black mass ghosting soundlessly across the grounds as he came for her, face white and hair burning against the bleak backdrop of the Forbidden Forest. His big hands and long fingers full of white-hot, crackling magic-

The small, soft gap between her thighs gulped pitifully as the Headmaster went on.

“As for disparaging you to your young bride, well. We understand it would only wound her. Quite grievously. Quite…. You must take my word when I assure you, General, that no one in this room wishes your dear one any harm.”

There was a tense pause, in which she felt some of her man’s anger cool down and unwind.

“Be that as it may,” his voice came back to her. It made her nipples tighten and her skin prickle softly. She wanted to tip her head and touch her neck as he spoke, “the fact remains she belongs in Slytherin-”

“Oh I beg to differ.” It was Professor Snape who spoke up coldly from farther away.

“As do I,” she recognized instantly the severe voice of her Head of House, Professor McGonagall. Oh, she sounded _seriously _cheesed off. “She _cannot_ be sorted to Slytherin, as you well know, General. According to its House precepts written by Salazar Slytherin himself.”

“Her blood, you mean?” her husband’s next words made her heart wince, “You’re referring to her impurity-”

“I am referring to her _parentage,” _McGonagall spoke over him, “Please never again make the mistake of assuming I equate the two. I leave that sort of ignorance to you and your _associates_.”

“My associates?” now Armitage sounded slightly amused. She felt something else curl through his soothed-down temper. A long black tongue of contempt_. _“What exactly are you insinuating, Minerva?”

“What everyone in this room well knows. Your affinity for the Dark Arts-”

“I do not believe this vein of conversation will prove fruitful, Minerva,” her Headmaster was gentle but firm, “The fact remains Rey belongs in Gryffindor House-”

“The fact is-” her husband’s diction grew razor-sharp. It made in ache in that small, needy slit getting wetter and wetter, “- she belongs to _me_, and to the House of Hux. My bloodline reaches back a thousand generations. She is a Slytherin.”

“Not in my school, dear boy.”

Hatred flashed through her husband’s magic. It was mesmerizing to stand there inside its dark mouth, to feel his power surging all around her. She’d never felt another wizard’s magic. A part of her wondered from a dreamy, underwater sleep if all bonded couples could feel each other’s auras this way.

Or if it was just him.

_Her Arkanian._

Eyes still closed, she saw warm, dark-shimmering visions of young witches naked and wrapped sensually inside their dragon’s scaled tails.

_Beautiful…_

“So we shall see if it remains,” her husband was saying suddenly. Her heartbeat, which had sunk into a slow velvet rhythm, clicked on and sped up. She snapped out of her strange daydream feeling feverish with fear.

He was coming down.

“Good day-” he said from almost directly above her. The gargoyle opened its sightless eyes and growled at her.

She shrieked and leapt back as it prepared itself to move aside.

She needed to _hide._

The General straightened his cuffs around his gloves as he descended the stone staircase. His pupils strained to dilate despite the strong light. His tongue felt wet and sensitive inside his mouth. He had the strangest urge to send it flickering into the air.

_Scenting._

His body was buzzing with electricity. The mark on his forearm _burned_.

Oh yes. His little one was very near.

And very _excited, _from the taste of her small aura held inside his magic’s maw. He felt her energy, her confusion and sexual excitement at his proximity. So ravenous in its innocence.

_So young._

His kitten would be wet and needy, the way she was in the train car the day they met. If this time they were interrupted again-

White heat sparked off his fingertips. But the moment he stepped off the last stair, his hackles raised and his gut went eerily calm.

She was _there, _in the hall. With him now.

_Where are you, little witch, _his cool blue eyes panned slowly through the long, narrow passageway. His Dark Mark seared him like a brand. _Come out, come out-_

_Ah-ha. _

He caught the soft, sudden hush of velvet and the rustle of her black crinoline skirt. The flash of smooth, tan skin inside one of the central alcoves revealed her.

He heard her breath catch in her throat.

A predatory smirk spread itself across his wide, sensual mouth as he made his way leisurely to her hiding place. He felt her fear and anticipation as he worked off his leather gloves finger-by-finger. Her excitement buzzed at the base of his skull.

Strange, how whenever she was near his resolve to keep her at arm’s length dissolved. In this moment, he wanted only to gather her into his lap in some warm, dim-lit corner of the castle and please her with soft kisses and rich treats and sweet wine.

“Have a care, Hux.”

_Severus._

The General turned, hatred cracking like a whip down his spine.

The Potions Master was posed dramatically at the mouth of the staircase, ever the tormented Gothic soul. From his air of open hostility, the General sensed he spoke without knowing the girl was there with them.

_Good._ The thought of another dark wizard watching her when she was vulnerable and aching for love made the General positively _rabid_.

He kept his white hands folded mildly behind him and raised his chin. “I beg your pardon?”

“You may call it a word of caution,” the Potions Master enunciated precisely as he gestured eerily to himself, “I have walked the path you now tread to its conclusion and I tell you with no small amount of regret- that way lies devastation. For you, and the girl.”

The General’s sneer became cruelly amused as he swept forward. He was well aware that, over his shoulder, his bride strained to hear every word.

He began in a deceptively casual tone, “I take it you mean your unfortunate liaison with Miss Lily Evans-”

The Potions Master winced and ticked his jaw.

The General continued, “I heard how she perished that night alongside her infant son.”

He stopped and considered the high, cathedraled ceiling arching down the length of the hall. “What _was _the name of her husband – the boy’s father? Was it Potter?”

Another tick of the Potions Master’s jaw.

“Yes,” the General spoke softly, smiling blackly now, like a crocodile rising up through the swamp, “I believe it was. _James Potter_. He died her hero, did he not?”

“I am warning you, Hux,” Severus folded his arms like a dark Jinn and lifted his chin. His small, black eyes burned coldly down the length of his hooked nose, “For her sake. _Break_ the bond.”

For the past ten years, the General had been contemplating how to do just that.

But now, every cell inside him desired to keep her, to lavish her with luxury and to bathe her in affection. Until she grew ripe.

He wanted to give her _everything. _

Magic crackling, he stepped closer and spoke lowly so that only the Potions Master could hear.

“You think because you let a little mudblood slip through your fingers and then killed her with your incompetence that I shall do the same? Half-bred fool,” the Potion Master’s snarl only made the General’s smile more sinister, “You have never walked as I do because _we_ are not equals. I am above.”

Severus’s eyes flashed murder. But he did not speak another word as he gathered his dignity and spun away with a sharp, dark whirl of his robes.

“Leave my girl well alone, Severus,” the General called after him. All the while his hands stayed tensed behind his back. “Or I shall find you alone in an alley on some dark night.”

The Potions Master halted sharply at the mouth of the hallway and fixed him with a deathly glare.

“Pray that you don’t.”

The General watched him disappear with another theatrical billow of his robes before turning his attention back to the alcove where his young wife hid.

Alone at last.

_Steady, _he chided his eagerness. She was still a very little girl, and she quite despised him. A fact he found perversely charming, given his affinity for bold, pretty witches with a histrionic edge.

He would simply have to win her trust, then her deference and affection would follow. By the time she had completed her magical education, she would long for her place in his lap and in his bed. Seven years was hardly a long time to a wizard. For an Arkanian, it was the blink of an eye.

But he must begin _softly._

“You may come out now, sneakling,” he made sure she could hear the good humor within his severe-sounding voice.

Another delicate, feminine rustle made him picture a long skirt gathered over creamy thighs and his hand working tenderly beneath them. It suffused him with heat that would light a normal man on fire.

“I won’t be angry,” he beckoned her, mark blazing and heart ravening at his ribs. “Come my love, don’t be shy.”

His bride stepped tentatively out into the hallway after peering out at him around the smooth stone.

His breath shuttered and his blood rushed roaring to everywhere it _shouldn’t, _as visions of sweet sashes tied around modest child-gowns dissolved.

His wife was dressed like a high-price harlot, the sort of delicacy one might buy in Nocturn Alley for a depraved, indulgent evening. He could see nearly the entire length of her slim, tanned legs bracketed by a pair of glossy patent shoes and a velvet skirt made light as air by pleated layers of black crinoline. The neck of her dress was entirely too low, showing off her flat, boney collar and dimpled, sun-dappled line of her sternum. Her warm-colored eyes stared up at him fearfully, while the soft ends of her hair dripping over her shoulders like coils of smoke danced with her trembling. She had been crying.

Simultaneously, he was furious, aching and – he admitted balefully – _aroused_.

“Good gods, child,” his blood pounded, he wanted to reach out and snatch her, wrench her over his knee and rap her bare bottom until she was red and weeping apologies. He wanted to take her until she was limp and drunk off his cock against the slate wall.

He tamped out those impulses as he came to loom over her. His voice was deadly calm, “What in Hades do you think you’re wearing?”

She snapped out of her fear-filled, trance-like state and balled up her hands. Her rings winked at him. She was covered in imitation jewels.

“Get _away from me_,” she edged back as she screeched, “I hate you!”

“Gracious.” He advanced casually, as if they were playing a game. “Whatever have I done now?”

“Go way and leave me alone!” she scrambled back faster, making soft rustles with that ridiculous, delectable dress. Her patent shoes gleamed like the star-lit tears now falling down her round cheeks as she hissed at him, “You- you’re _evil_. _Murderous snake_-”

“Evil? Well,” he lost the battle with a quarter-smile. What could this child possibly understand about him or the mark that burned him for being near her? “I wonder what could make you say such a thing. Has someone told you a story about me?”

Her beautiful, fragile expression crumbled.

“You ki-killed all those pe-people, for _him_-” she choked on her grief and gulped out, “_V-Voldemort_. You killed people li-like me-” she couldn’t say the word.

_Mudbloods._

Her heartbreak rankled him. He was fully upon her as he took her slight waist between his hands. She struggled weakly with her hands at his chest as he bowed nearer, but he held her as tenderly and easily as one holds a kitten while his eyes searched her sad face.

"Who told you that?” he asked her quietly.

She began to cry in earnest, shoulders shaking, her face crumpled in as she continued to squirm. “I read it, in _The Rise and Fall of the Dark Arts. _Your picture’s in there- a-and all the bad things you done. Oh Armitage,” she held the lapels of his robes and pressed her face against his heart and sobbed, “how could you do it? Why?”

An ugly, unfamiliar emotion welled inside him. Something cold and clear as ice.

_Remorse._

Suddenly, he became hyperaware of the openness of their surroundings. How his young wife was here so _conveniently _waiting for him, dressed like a temptation and utterly distraught. He thought back to Dumbledore’s calm condescension and the Potions Master’s smirks.

Was this a trap?

“Shh-shh, none of that now, sweeting,” his instincts whirled darkly as he lifted her bodily and settled her like a child against his chest. She was such a little girl, petite and somewhat too thin; she wormed but could not escape him. He kept her close with his long, strong arms.

He soothed her back and hushed her gently, “Ah-ah, I said none of that…”

She squealed and struggled, tried to slip through his grip, but he held fast, kissing her wet cheeks as he bore her quickly through the hall and down a series of corridors. His magic flexed lazily in the nearness of her aura, its dark smolder smothered her cooler, feminine energy in sensual love.

Where he was taking her, he had not the slightest idea. Until he recognized the darkening stone and wending staircases leading down to-

_The dungeons. _

They descended a flight of steps bathed in shadow and lit scarcely by torch light; he recognized the narrow corridor at its landing as one of the multitude of discreet, secluded passageways surrounding Slytherin House.

At the base of his throat, his blood thrummed approvingly. He felt overwhelmed by the primal urge to take her deep underground. There the air would be dark and thick with fertile earth scents. He would lay her down on a mound of gold and admire her bare, glowing body. He would bathe her soft skin with his tongue.

_My lovely treasure-_

The black desires taking root startled him. Rattled, he slowed his stride.

Oh yes, they were deep beneath the castle now, far off from the corridors the students used. The stone there was darker and cruder, the narrow hallway was cool and dry and lit only by the sparsely spaced torches hung in iron grates along the wall. They stopped inside the shadows between warm circles of light, her body now soft and still in his arms except for her tremors.

“Wh-where are we?” she whispered, peering cautiously from the shelter of his chest, holding in her small hands the lapels of his robes as a child holds her bedding for fear of what lurks beneath her bed.

_Somewhere no one will find us, _the sinister thought alarmed and thrilled him. The lusty seedlings hidden inside his heart flowered and sighed.

“Somewhere safe,” he murmured back. He let her slide down the length of his body as the mark in his arm seethed. He kept his white hands on her waist to keep her from fainting, he relished the cool slickness of her satin sash and her smallness compared with his height. His fingertips could nearly touch behind her low back. She still held onto his robes, shivering like a sacrifice to the winged gods who breathed fire.

She whimpered, “I wanna go back.”

“Yes-” he cupped her cheek in one wide, warm palm. He tipped up her chin with his thumb. Either her skin was ice cold, or he was on _fire._

His hot breath touched her lips as he whispered, “That would be wise.”

He kissed her.

It was gentle and chaste.

Until she opened her mouth in surprise.

_Just a little taste, _he told himself, as his tongue slipped like a love note to the back of her throat. On reflex she startled and swallowed him, he rewarded her by pressing her back against the textured stone and _molding_ himself to her.

His fingertips trailed her jaw, her neck, her chest – he touched her everywhere a woman longs to be touched.

_Softly._

She strained up onto her tiptoes and whimpered into his mouth.

It was the bond-magic, snaking its way around them the same way his tongue coiled jealously around hers. Its energy made him reckless, unscrupulous. _Feral._

It made him ache with desire for the one that belonged only to him.

Remembering the way she was dressed, all gleaming bare shoulders and creamy naked thighs, he broke their kiss and took her throat harshly between his lips.

“Armitage!” she gasped and clutched him.

The mark he made there, how forcefully the blood burst the delicate capillaries beneath her skin as he suckled, made her struggle and bleat.

“_Stop_,” she mewed pitifully, hands scrabbling at his shoulders and along his back, “It _hurts-”_

When he was satisfied, he did.

“That is enough caterwauling for an evening, I think,” he lifted his head and watched his hand wrap itself lovingly around her throat. Their bodies still embracing, he tilted her face back and spoke very close to her mouth. “Do you mind telling me what you think you were doing, sulking outside the Headmaster’s chambers dressed like a muggle slut?”

She flinched, beautiful tears of fear and confusion and need slipping down her temples onto her freckled shoulders. “I wasn’t-!”

“Don’t lie to me, girl,” he scolded softly before he dipped to steal the wet salt from her neck with quick, open kisses. She shuddered and slackened in his grip, scissoring her small thighs trapped in against the wall together so that he could _smell _her hot slick.

He rose back up like a wraith swallowing the night and wrung her. Tenderly.

“Answer me, dearest,” his demand was adoring, devoted. Insane. “Tell me why my lady has made herself up like a harlot and come weeping at the very hour I should be here. It’s too perfect to be coincidence, don’t you think so?”

“Pi-piss off, _lunatic,_” she spat, breathless and glowering, digging her fingers into his strong forearm between her shaking hands.

His Dark Mark raged like it would leap off his skin and kill her. He thumbed her lower lip, wet and lush from his kiss, and smiled. “Ah yes, I see the Gryffindor now-”

She snarled and thrashed.

He held her as easily as if she were an infant swaddled in his loving arms. And she was. _His child. _

“Ah-ah- would you like me to take you over my knee, little witch?” his thumb continued to sweep pendulously along her soft lip.

It quivered as she gasped.

“Yes, perhaps I should,” he lowered his voice to a sensual simmer and brought their faces even closer.

Again, she scissored her thighs.

More tears dazzled down her temples. She shook her head as best she could with her throat in his soft grip and whined, “No please don’t…”

“Well?” he arched one eyebrow.

She started, “I- was in the library lookin’ for- for answers- to my essay an’- and I saw you in the book-”

“Go on.”

“I thought you were terrible – you _are _terrible,” she glared at him, even as she spread herself to let his thigh slip with a _hush_ between her legs. “I ca-came to ah-ask Dumbledore- to ask-”

Her lashes fluttered as, all on her own, she pressed tentatively her little cunny against his muscular thigh.

“Armitage…”

“You came to ask him to break the bond?” he felt a swell of masculine pride as she closed her eyes and let her small, untried hips work herself against him. Through his slacks, he could feel she was soused.

She bit her lips and said nothing. She held his arm loosely, her eyes stayed closed while she rutted against him as much as she dared. A comely little blush stained her rounded cheeks.

“What a shrewd little witch you are,” he pressed up into her, relishing the way it made her shudder and clutch her thighs and gasp. The smell of her arousal painted the air around them, he sopped up the tear streaks drying on her temples with his lips before he murmured in her ear, “_Still. _I will not have my wife parade herself for these randy schoolboys-”

She exhaled hotly and shuddered as he surged and ground into her again.

“If I catch you in another one of these come-fuck-me confections outside my manor, I shall give you a lashing you will never forget,” she succumbed to a full-body conniption, “You will _long _for the mercy of Madam Beaux’s willow switch. Do I make myself clear?”

She nodded against his shoulder, hiccupping and trembling, with barely any breath. “Yes! Yesyesyes I understand_!”_

“Excellent,” he let his hand slip softly from her neck and kissed her. Deep and full on her childish cherry mouth.

She rewarded him with her arms clutched tightly about his neck. His big hand engulfed her hip and startled her, but she quickly grew eager for his touch as he trained her to pleasure against his thigh. He skin underneath his slacks was coated in her extract. Beneath his palm on her flat chest, dulled through a bit of sock-batting, he sensed the vivid beat of her heart.

He traced her upper palate with the tip of his tongue and tasted her sigh.

_Have her, if you want her, _his heart thundered among violent sugared visions of her split open, helpless and limp with her pink tongue lolling and her pretty eyes leaking tears and rolled back in her skull._ No one can stop you. It is your right…_

His Dark Mark _burned_ him.

Slowly, he peeled their lips apart.

His breath shuddered hotly across her innocent face, as if he’d been running for leagues and leagues. He felt drunk on the black synth waves of impulse as he stared into her; for a moment, he couldn’t remember what sort of man he was.

“Armitage,” she called him. Whisperingly. Sweetly. With so much uncertainty. Her body trembled. Her small slit made beautiful, obscene sounds as she rode his thigh, aching to come.

How could he hurt one so precious?

He traced the arc of her open upper lip with his tongue before he asked, “Do you really think I could harm you- I, who have cared for you almost all your life? Do you think I could bear to hurt you?”

Fresh tears slipped through her lashes. In a small voice, she answered him. “No…”

“No,” he hung his head. Their foreheads touched. The shame of it overwhelmed him as he confessed, “I could sooner harm myself.”

He kissed her. Her fingers went to his hair, she tried desperately to return his love, her tiny tongue wet and unsure as she sent it out to play with his own.

His magic cocooned them, making the corridor intimate and hot. He worked her faster, harder, more fluidly against his thigh as he read her tremors, her gasps and whimpers to make her come. Inside his dark imagination, she was in his lair now, a pretty little virgin laid out on his alter by the wizards who wished to slake his violence. Was that not the very beginning of his ancestors? Was that not the very legacy of the House of Hux?

Was it Dumbledore’s intention all along?

He did not care he did not _he did not_-

His love came to him, so sweetly. Crying out her pleasure into his mouth as her little sex squelched hotly against his thigh. His heart thundered like a beast’s roaring. He held her and lapped up every shudder, every mewl and whimper, every soft-stuttering sigh.

The hat had given her to him. So he would take her.

He knelt even as she shivered and gasped weakly and clutched his robes.

He lifted her dress.

Layers of dark crinoline made a wreath of fluttering, soft-crinkling shadow around her glowing tan thighs, her panties were a mess of black lace and gleaming slick covering her pussy. She was a gift of smooth, tremoring skin.

He alone would unwrap her.

Her breath caught as he peeled aside the gusset to reveal her small, smooth slit glinting like ripe, pink fruit. His cock thrummed painfully; she dug her fingers into her shoulders and mewed panicked and mesmerized, “_Don’t_!”

The soles of her patent shoes made hushed, grainy sounds on the stone as his white hands spread her legs. He thumbed her sopping little slit and groaned.

She smelled so _good_, fresh as warm bathwater, salty like tears. He peeled apart her folds and admired her swollen, throbbing pink flesh as above him she ceased breathing. He heard the low _crack-hiss _of the torches, and of his ancestors, as he leaned in and down and dragged the hot flat of his tongue along the open length of her slit.

They both moaned.

Her taste was exquisite. Sweet, needy young cunt. His fingers anchored themselves in the taut, slick flesh of her thighs. He lifted her, spreading her _wide, _baring her fully. She weighed nothing to him. She grappled and gripped his hair and whined panting, “No… please… _don’t_…”

Crinoline crinkled softly as he ate her, lapping her soft pink lips and suckling them into his mouth. Everything about her was so tiny and delicate. He lavished her flesh before his tongue pressed into her sex. She was tight and dripping like honeycomb. He supped greedily, shifting closer to shore her on his shoulders so that he could touch her.

Her whines soon gentled to whimpers as she pleaded whispering, “Please… please… please…”

He kneaded the small globes of her asscheeks and the sensitive crease where thighs met pelvis as finally his lips sealed around her clit.

It was small, so small. _Fragile_. Like the petal of a cherry blossom. She bucked and gasped and juddered and panted each time he slipped the tip of his tongue through its indent.

He bullied her gently, savoring her trembling building beneath his mouth and within his hands. Her cunt dripped hot, syrupy slip down his chin and onto the stonework. His mark ached, but he was in ecstasy. His heart beat slow and hard inside his throat and along his cock.

She came again too soon for him, shuddering violently. She coated him generously in her slick as she keened.

With his tongue and with his fingers he probed her clenching openings and drew out her orgasm. Her eyes rolled and she choked on nothing, convulsing before she went limp on his shoulders against the wall.

Tenderly, he stood and guided her down to her knees on the floor his body had warmed for her. Her lashes fluttered, she stared unseeingly up at him, still shaking with fissuring tremors as he gripped her hair at the base of its high tail-style and drew out his cock.

“Open, sweeting,” he coaxed her breathlessly, his red, angry girth pulsing in his hand. “Yes, there’s a good little mudblood. Show me your pretty tongue.”

There were no words to describe the black flutter in his chest when his beautiful little bride let her eyes shut serenely and her head tip back as she stretched out her pink kitten tongue. His breath shuddered hotly, he pumped his length a few strokes and came lurching, all over her face and into her mouth.

“Such a good little girl, Rey,” he panted. He thumbed a bit of thick, white cream from her lashes as he felt his heartbeat wind down. “Swallow, my love. All of it. Yes, like that-”

She blinked sleepily at him through streaks of come. “I’m tired…”

“Mm, is it bedtime, do you think?” he smiled tenderly. His fingers brushed her forehead like a kiss as she yawned sweetly through her nod.

“Obliviate,” he whispered. Then he leaned down.

Their walk through the halls to Gryffindor Commons was a silent one. His bride was cleaned with magic and tucked safely inside his arms. It was late, through the high cathedral windows he saw the half-moon rise over the Forbidden Forest. They met no one until they came to the portrait at the top of a set of long stone stairs.

Its frame was empty except for its scenery. As he approached with his bride it swung aside.

In its absence stood Minerva McGonagall. She glared coldly at him over the rim of her black square-framed glasses. Beside her, her prefect tried to look equally stern.

But the boy – a Weasely, by appearances – was utterly terrified to see the General standing there.

“What have you done to that child,” she whispered. She shielded the Weasley boy with her arm and drew them back as the General stepped inside.

“I will arrive tomorrow at two as we discussed, for a walk with my lady,” the General told her in lieu of an answer. He did not pause his ghostly progress towards a flight of narrow turret stairs. How he knew they led to his wife’s room, he could not say really.

“The boy may be our chaperone, if you insist.”

“I do. And General-” with a quick rustle of her robes, the witch followed him.

Halfway up the turret stairs, he turned and met her.

She stood at the base, staring up at him through her lenses. She was not afraid of him.

_How very rare…_

“If you _are_ to continue to see Lady- to see Miss Rey while she is at Hogwarts,” she would not call her _Lady Hux_. “There are two conditions I must impress.”

His brow arched. “Go on.”

“The first is that you are never again to be alone with her. There will be a supervision of my choosing at all times.”

The Weasely boy paled visibly.

The General inclined his head in acknowledgement. “And the second?”

“The second,” she folded her hands in front of her robes and took a steadying breath, “is that you leave her _intact _while she is here. Gods help that poor child when she graduates,” for a moment, the witch’s face reflected sadness. Then again it became stern. “But until then, she is my charge, and under my protection.”

Boldly, she mounted the first step. “Do not test me in this, General. You will be sorry you ever did.”

His eyes flashed. Oh he did so _love _a challenge.

_Alas-_

“Very reasonable, Professor,” he nodded once. Then he gave her a quarter-smile too smug to miss his gloat. “Now, I must put my girl to bed.”

“Very well,” she frowned but did not follow him. He felt her eyes on his back until he reached the top of the stairs.

The other two girl-children were already sleeping peacefully in their beds. In the center of their small room, the charmed roses he sent his bride seemed to glow under the light of the moon pouring in.

“Sleep well,” his bid his lady quietly after he had gently unwrapped her from her dress and tucked her tenderly beneath the covers.

He kissed her cheek, and then her hand.

“Until tomorrow,” he said.

He walked alone along the path that lead from the castle to Hogsmeade Station. The grounds keeper did not accompany him, he carried no lantern and made no light. He saw only by the pale, cool glow of the half-moon washing down over the shadows.

Other than the croak and creak of the late summer insects and the conspiratorial murmur of the wind through the trees, the Forbidden Forest made no sound. Even its most sinister creatures - those that preyed on the weak and the pure-hearted – slithered and crept away from his path. They followed him with their bright mirrored eyes from the tree line until he slipped unimpeded through the charmed iron gates.

They feared he would come back.

From the warm-glowing window of his chambers, the Headmaster had watched him until he disappeared into night’s dark throat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you are delighted by this story, click the Kudos button and leave a comment down below!
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	4. It really is quite filthy down here!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Oh, let's see... A bit of waning Bellatrix/Armitage... a little witchy Saved by The Bell... dramatic dialogues- oh, definitely some Rose/Fed/George heavy petting... some Rey/Armitage fingering... (what am I forgetting...)
> 
> Oh yeah. Voldemort.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well this was a fun little 17,000 word detour from what I am supposed to be working on. Really, it was =>
> 
> January, I hope you feel better. Inside, and out <3
> 
> If the last chapter disgusted you- honey, you're not going to like this one. For tamer, more appropriate Rey/Hux dynamics, check out my other works.

Sweat dripped.

It stung his eyes and burned his lips pricked by sharp-toothed kisses. His breath sawed in sultry, ragged bursts through his open mouth. His hips pistoned _faster faster faster-_

“- _yes, gods yes- do it hah-harder- Armita-hage-”_

He fist knotted in her hair. He chased his heartbeat, the ripple of pleasure rising in the base of his spine like a bright burning sun-

_“Fuck!” _she wailed pitifully.

“Language, girl,” he snarled. Their bodies slapped; he strained the tendons in his white forearm and wrenched her up off the bed.

The bound body of Bellatrix Lestrange dragged in an arc, backwards and backwards, until their slick foreheads met.

Her beautiful black moon eyes shone upside down at him. He panted, watching her little breasts bounce, draped everywhere by her long, soft, dark-wild hair. “What do we say when we’re naughty?”

“Fah-fuck you, Daddy-” she whispered gleefully, adoringly, through her hitched, snagging breaths.

His heart thrashed. Inside her, his cock knocked viciously at the mouth of her womb.

“Ah-ah-ah,” he collared her throat and squeezed her, making the tendons in his forearms bulge up.

Their Dark Marks writhed together.

She wheezed laughing and stuck out her tongue. The pink, sleek-flexing muscle had hours before laved his cock. “_Ooo, deeper, Daddy. _Deeper deeper deeper! Mmn, please Daddy? Please please please-”

“Earn it,” he said, and slipped two long fingers down her throat.

She suckled him greedily, delightedly, as she gagged.

His cool eyes watched her taut, sweat-slick belly concave in the mirror by his bed.

She had always been exquisite to him, his Bella. Snow white and fragile. _Juvenile_. Viciously, viciously sweet. Her body a beautiful wasteland of small, round breasts and cruel-jutting rib bones; of thick, fleshy buttocks that slapped gratuitously against his thighs and hot, tight cunt. For decades, he had chased her devotedly, even rescuing her from Azkaban. Lapping up whatever crumbs she fed him from her cold, slender hands. Even after his pairing to the other witch, he could not give her up. Her insanity, her childish neediness, bewitched him.

She was his only, only vice.

“Bella, my Bella, do you love me?” he whispered, holding her tightly about her slender middle and dragging his fingers through her lips.

Her hot, hard clench around his cock bludgeoning inside her was his answer.

He fucked her madly, with abandon, as she shrieked and struggled with joy. Teeth bared, her white hands clasped elbow-to-elbow behind her and bound lovingly with red silk rope. The tips of her fingers turned whiter with every second he dragged out. His eyes closed, he relished the pitiful suckle of her pussy at his thick, veined cock.

His sweat dripped off his taut, fast-fucking musculature and soused her, making her skin shone translucent, like the moon. She was beauty _beauty beauty-_

He had asked her to marry him when they were children.

She had laughingly refused.

“_Please,” _she gasped now, with that insane, sweet child trembling smile on her glorious little mouth. She was weeping, cunt collapsing in and knitting all around him, strangling him with her lush, soft-quaking walls.

_Ecstasy, ecstasy-_

“Who is your master?” he murmured tenderly as his grip relaxed on her throat. He stroked her belly and teased her breasts softly and nuzzled and kissed her bruised neck.

“Nobody, nobody-” she cried hoarsely, gleefully, body clapping and rippling with the hard, racing pound of his thrusts, “I don’t have a master I- I- _Armitaaage…_”

“Who loves you, then?” he kissed her white shoulder with wet, parted lips and stroked the marks on her pulse with his thumb.

“N-nobody,” she grinned even more manically up at the ceiling. She was crying earnestly now.

She closed her beautiful, dark, long lashes and whispered, “Daddy loves the mudblood now.”

His pace faltered; he saw a flash of the face of the younger, sweeter witch. “You know that’s not true-”

His Bella came anyway laughing and weeping all over him, a warm liquid rush that sopped his still-slapping balls. He wound his arms around her breasts and belly and held her tightly with closed eyes. He mapped the feel of the rope binding her arms together biting into him. The hot, slick bounce of her tiny body. Her hair, soft and damp, floating all around him. Her beautiful, beautiful cunt-

His heart slipped through his grasp and fell down, down, down into darkness.

“_Belle,_” he came in slamming, violent strokes that made her choke and strain shuddering and pulse more. Scathing ropes of his seed filled her barren womb and drowned her.

Wasted, wasted hope.

“I do not love her,” he rasped, eyes still closed. His heart thundered, he kept her pinned and stayed deep, deep inside her, shuddering softly with each waning gush. “I do not. My darling-”

He would not, _not, _think about-

No.

Bella laid her head back on his shoulder, draping them both in a soft, mournful cloud of her curls.

“Don’t you dare go- s-soft on me- Daddy,” she panted wetly, still struggling for breath. She shook like a leaf in a black, wicked wind; her tears sparkled like jewels on her pale face and throat. “I only lah- love you when- you’re absolutely- awful. You know that…”

He laughed, a hoarse, wounded sound, and panted back, “And here I was- laboring- under the delusion- you didn’t love me at all-”

She turned and touched her nose to chis cheek and kissed him.

He caught her desperately by the mouth.

Their kiss was long and sensual. Delicate. They both were trembling. Her bindings on her arms and ankles slipped off and slithered away from them. His hands searched the soft, concaving planes of her body as she wound her fingers through his sweat-bright hair.

On her tongue he tasted tragedy, and emptiness, and past lives.

She would always, always be lost.

Ever since his night at the castle with the other, he had felt his Bella fading away more and more…

“Belle,” he held her like a child and rocked her. Cherishing her with kisses and tasting her tears. Whispering to her with shut eyes until she smiled into his kisses.

“It’s alright, Daddy. The Dark One is coming,” her tongue rolled around his mouth. She rubbed the tips of their noses together. “He’s going to make me his angel and forgive all my sins. You’ll see.”

“My sweet girl,” he laid his forehead on hers and held her more fiercely. In this moment, the other was completely forgot.

“He is never coming back.”

She did not flinch and she did not waver. She turned giddily towards him, letting his thick, softening column slip wetly from her warm body, and wound her fragile arms like twin serpents about his neck.

“Silly Babbity, he never, never left me. All the pretty pretty pieces he hid very well-”

She pecked his lips quickly, like the strike of a cobra, and bowed backwards, letting her hands float up, up and behind her as she hung from his strong grip on her waist. Her small brown nipples jutted at the ceiling; her body was liquid glass in the strong firelight.

The room was balmy and fragrant from their lovemaking, saturated in the clean earthy sent of her pussy and of her perfume, white oleander and tender nightshade flower, and of his powerful virile musk. It was intoxicating, the way she looked swaying back and forth on his bed like a pendulum, trailed by her beautiful hair.

He thought about having her again as she tittered in her little girl voice, “Can’t you feel him coming? He is whispering to me through the stars-”

She giggled at something secret and silent; he watched his come leach glistening from her red folds and run in pale, pretty rivers down her thigh.

His eyes creased with grief in their corners as they lingered over her deadened womb.

Still no one knew why so many of purebloods had been struck sterile in their generation and the one that followed. A cruel twist of nature which had broken his heart. For secretly, he still believed if he had caught her with child when they were younger, she would not have fallen to Tom Riddle’s sway. She would have stayed loyal to him.

She would have loved him.

“- he says he’ll let you keep your little mudblood cockpet when he comes back. He’s so, so generous, my lord,” she was sighing. Her eyes were closed, wrists hung crossed over her face and fingertips touching on her parted lips.

He winced.

He told her steadily, but graveling, “Don’t ever call her that.”

She giggled again, stroking lovingly all the marks he had made on her neck. “Oo-ooo, Daddy says _no mocking the little mudbrat-”_

“_Bella,” _he squeezed her warningly.

Her hands reached up above her, sliding on the thick, dark duvet. The rose petals he had spread that evening clung to her milky white body. Sumptuous silk lined her lush, blue-veined skin.

Her Dark Mark danced without him.

“Oh no, Daddy’s vewy angwey. Why don’t you punish me,” she whispered excitedly, watching him with those big, black-glowering eyes. She was so utterly captivating. Utterly insane. “Please, Daddy? I’ll let you pretend I’m your muddy little slut. Oh dear oh no, what’s wrong now, Daddy?” her lashes fluttered innocently, “You don’t like me to call her that either? Why, what a muggle-lover you’ve become.”

His chest strained. He wanted to choke her. He wanted to lay his head over her empty belly and beg her to forgive his unfaithful heart.

He thought of the child in her tower and his love-flowers she kept by her bedside. Her little drawing she had given him for Christmas still sat in its silver frame on his mantel above the fire. A portrait of herself done in muggle pencils that did not move. Set beside it like flowers on an altar, were all the small watercolor landscapes she had painted for him of the places they took their walks.

His heart grieved.

He kissed Bella’s shoulder, then her collarbone. “No more play tonight, my beauty.”

He lifted himself off her and slipped away.

For a moment she lay there staring blankly at the mantel. Then she rolled and gathered up her body and stretched like a cat. “Fine. _Be_ _selfish,_ if you please, Armitage.”

She slid down from the silk and lifted her sheer torn dressing gown from the floor. “You always are.”

“I see.” Slowly, he came to stand before her. His cock swayed heavily between his strong, lean thighs. “Is that why you keep coming back to my bed?”

His cold blue eyes glinted at her fondly. Smirking, he took her robe he ripped earlier that evening from her body and mended it wordlessly with his hands.

It was a beautiful dark wine velvet with thorned roses, fringed in black tassel and tied with a corded sash. Sheer enough he could still see her nipples and the gaunt jut of her ribs through the cloth after cinching it tightly about her waist.

Her hair fell around them, wild and feral and lovely. He watched as she wound it into a loose chignon with her black alder wand.

“You’ll see when he comes back to drown them,” she was petulant, wounded, refusing to look him in the eyes. “You’ll have to beg for her worthless life.”

The corner of his mouth coiled tenderly. He kissed her forehead. “Wouldn’t that would be a sight.”

Her lip tremored, she chewed it cruelly. Her face angled away from his to hide her eyes behind her hair.

She stared at the mantel, swaying softly to song he could never hear.

“She’s changed you,” she whispered.

He took her face, and she clung onto his wrists.

“Time ruined us, Belle,” he kissed her lips softly. “Not her.”

“I’ll ask him not to kill you, when the time comes,” her mouth trembled. “I promise I will.”

“Thank you.” His thumb brushed a tear on her cheek.

“You used to call me _my angel,_” she said as she slipped away from him.

Madness, beautiful beautiful madness, danced in her eyes.

“I’ll hate that little bitch until the day she dies…”

She took a pinchful of floo powder from the tin on the mantel and turned on her tiptoes into the flames.

“House of Black.”

She melted in a wash of green acid light.

He stood and watched her go.

Rey _hated _charms.

Scratch that, she _loathed _it. The lessons were all impossible – silly flicks and whishes and _flitters _of her willow stick wand. Pulling magic from her heart and the air around her just so she could make some stupid tea kettle whistle and jump. As if _that _might ever be useful.

She was failing, she had to be. She was the worst one in her house by far. It didn’t matter if it was spells or charms or divinations. Or _potions. _Gods help her, potions were the hardest of all. Everything about them had to be done so correctly. She was shit at it – at all of it. She couldn’t cast and she couldn’t fly. A whole year and she felt like she knew less about being a witch than when she started.

And now exams were here, and she was about to fuck the lot of them up.

She just knew she would.

“Chin up, Miss- er- Lady Hux,” it was almost the end of the school year, and poor old Professor Flitwick still stumbled each time he called her by name. Well, by her lady-name anyway. He wasn’t the only one; all her teachers hesitated, except for Snape, who said it forebodingly, and with a sneer. No one grown up would ever call her by her first name save for Armitage-

Just thinking of him and what he’d say when he learned she failed all her year-ends made her keen harder into her page.

She’d been crying a full two minutes into her textbook in front of everyone, all because her stupid kettle just wouldn’t whistle _or _dance. It just sat there, shivering and mewling at her like she was an idiot, while a group of Slytherin boy in the back row heckled and laughed.

Now it was midmorning and class was nearly over and she’d tried _everything_ she could think of and still still still-

“It’s r-r-ruined, Profes-sessor,” she sobbed brokenhearted, “I’ll n-never pass my- zams….”

“Silly snorkacks,” Luna hooted sweetly. She wrapped her slight arm around Rey’s shoulders and laid her head on an incantation to make silver objects polish themselves on the opposite page. Her nose touched the tip of Rey’s wet and red one. Above her wreath of white cloud curls, her kettle was whistling a strange, mournful song. “You just have to pretend the kettle is already singing to you. A bit like imagining that your socks have turned up in your soup bowl at supper, so that when you look in your drawer properly, they’re already there. Do you see?”

Rey wanted to hang herself from the charmed chandelier. “I’m t-too thick, Luna-”

“Not at all, Lady Hux,” Flitwick clucked. He patted the back of her hand tenderly with his short, sharp-nailed fingers. “What we need is a pinch of perseverance. Why, isn’t that the Griffyndor way? Come come, we’ll make a spells mistress of you yet, my girl.”

“S’not likely to fail her anyway, is he?” One of the backrow boys, Roddy Ramaford, a champion muggle-hater, was whispering meanly to his friends. “None of ‘em will. They’re all too afraid of her _old man-”_

“Chut up, Roddy!” Rose turned and screeched, brandishing her pale willow wand at his chin like a blade. Her pearl drop choker bounced wildly at her throat, “or I’ll hex your stupid, ugly ass into next week!”

“Now Miss Tico-” Flitwick chided her affectionately, as she was his favorite.

“Sure you won’t be too busy suckin’ a Weasley off?” Roddy cut Flitwick off with a smirk, looking distinctly unimpressed by her threats.

Rosie blanched and Luna sang furiously, “What a rude little insect…” as Rey’s head shot up and she wiped her eyes.

Her chest burned; she would absolutely _kill him. _With the bloody tea pot, if it came to that.

Flitwick went as pink as a grapefruit and clutched his robes clasp. “_Mister Ramaford, _ten points from Slyth-”

But Rey was already out of her seat like a shot in the night.

“Shut up you loser!” Her face was beet red, wet and snotty from crying. The classmates in the row directly behind hers, between her and Roddy, leaned far out of her way on either side.

Her small body vibrated with a cold, electric fury that could set the room ablaze_. _She planted her palm on a desk and bore down at him, wobbling her new hairstyle she was trying. A treble of buns. “Pologize to her _right now_, Ramaford, or I swear to gods I’ll slap the silly wanker look off your face!”

“Lady Hux!” Flitwick now swayed as if he might faint from scandal. His spectacles were all askew as he blustered, “I am sorry but that is ten points from-”

Ramaford kicked back his seat to balance on its hindlegs. He tucked his hands behind his head with fingers laced together and looked Rey’s smart black school robes up and down.

“Dunno, Huxy,” he shrugged musingly, “How ‘bout you come kiss it instead?”

His cronies flanking him sniggering and _ooo_ed as Rey’s blood caught righteous fire inside.

She bared her teeth and raised her wand-

“Mister Ramaford,” a sharp, formal voice wound its way smoothly from the door of their classroom. As quiet and dark-scaled as an asp.

Rey jumped.

Roddy glanced then went pale as a ghost and scrambled, slamming his chair down on all fours and straightened up smart as he could as he whimpered, “Sir.”

The General stepped over the threshold into the classroom. He was dressed very lordly-like in his rich funereal robes. His black leather gloves gleamed like new ink under the bright candelabras, his hair slicked down severely against his skull glinted so darkly it looked like fresh blood. In his hand he carried a bouquet of lush, elegant flowers as pink as her angry little cheeks.

Her heart skipped maddeningly. He never, _never _told her when he’d come.

It had been a month since he last _deemed _to grace her; they had squabbled by the Black Lake before he Disapparated in a silent whirr of black robes. For the life of her she couldn’t remember what they’d fought about. In the beginning, before they quarreled, she had told him she missed the peonies that grew at Madam Beaux’s. There were none in the Highlands.

And now he had brought her a bushel-full in front of everyone. Completely unannounced.

His cool blue eyes weren’t looking at her. Rather, they had Ramaford pinned to his seat beneath a killing gaze.

“Are you propositioning my wife?” Armitage asked.

Her belly flipped; nervous sniggers and _ooo_’s rippled through the classroom. She would absolutely _murder _him once they were alone.

Behind him, Percival had to stand on tippytoe to peer anxiously over his shoulder. Her man was taller than ten Professor Flitwicks, with a very sharp, angular figure. He looked horribly mean just now.

She heard Roddy swallow like a scared gillygup before tripping over his tongue, “N-no sir never! no never I- s-sorry, Mister Lord erm- Lord Hux, sir-”

“I _got it, _thank you,” Rey punctuated her enunciations with a head wobble. Luna piped unhelpfully, “But no you don’t…”

Without glancing, Armitage raised to finger to her.

She crossed her arms beneath her barely-there breasts and huffed. “Insufferable ass…”

“I believe,” drawled Armitage slowly, “you owe the professor and Lady Hux an apology.”

“S-s-s-sorry, I’m sorry Professor, L-lady Hux-”

Rey rolled her eyes.

“What ‘bout Rosie?” she cocked her hip out. “How ‘bout you pologize to her?”

“Yeah yeah yeah, s-sorry Tico. Sorry,” he blathered on and on as his mates all stared pale-faced and wide-eyed out the windows or at their quills.

Rosie hmphed and stuck her pretty little nose up in the air. “Chht, whatevah.”

Then to Rey she whispered, “Thank you, dolly.”

“You’re welcome, dolly,” Rey whispered back.

“Filius-”

Rey’s belly dipped and buzzed. She had hoped, _hoped, _that terrible awful man had disappeared.

But he was still standing in the doorway, as black and smug as Death.

“- I fear I must borrow your pupil. Pray excuse my interruption.”

Flitwick’s hands flittered nervously around his wand. “Why not at all, not at all. Young love, and all that-” he winced at his own choice of words.

The dragon stretched out his hand to her. “My lady.”

She wouldn’t budge.

“I’m having my lesson,” she stuck her nose up in the air like Rose.

The peonies crinkled softly in their brown paper wrapping. Like the excited murmur of children before bed. His demure skeleton smile made her nervous.

“I trust I shall be able to fill the gaps,” he told her mildly.

Even though she was twelve, she blushed.

Furiously, she gathered up her books and green ink quills and parchments, making absolutely as much noise as she could.

“I hate him,” she hissed under her breath to her dollies.

Rosie fretted, while Luna whispered dreamily, “Oh, do make him snog you this time...”

Rey snorted viciously, but her legs tingled as they carried her through the classroom. She wouldn’t look at him as she took his big gloved hand.

Softly, he kissed her knuckles.

She rolled her eyes and tried not to cream her panties as he murmured, “You changed your hair.”

“Please, s’been this way for week,” again she folded her arms. “You’d noticed if you came ever.”

“Did you miss me?” his rumbled sounded dubious and good humored. He thumbed an errant tear from her cheek.

“Chht,” she flushed and muttered, “Fat chance.”

“So I feared.”

Wordlessly, wandlessly, he took her booksack and reduced it to the size of a galleon. With envy she watched him tucked it in neatly at his breast.

He slipped the swath of her peonies into her arms as gently as if they were an infant.

Their beauty hurt her, in all the good ways. She stroked their petals and cradled them lovingly to her chest.

“Thank you,” she yielded whisperingly. Her classmates, she knew from the other visits all year, would be straining to hear. “They are really lovely-” she nuzzled them with her cheek, “- but I really am put out.”

He offered her his arm. “Then I promise, I shall not keep you long.”

_But why not just keep me forever, _she would have said, if stupid Percy had the decency not to interrupt.

“You have one hour,” he warned them pompously, his prefect’s badge gleamed obnoxiously on his chest.

_Bossy little germ._

“_Fine.” _

With a huff, she took her man’s arm and let him sweep her slowly, gracefully out into the torch-lit hall.

“But can’t you wait at least until the free period?” she pulled the sleeves of her soft, silver jumper over her tightly curled fingers and pinched it there with her thumbs.

She’d ditched her robes when they got out past castle lawn. She wore her favorite jumper she ordered through a muggle catalogue, a green tartan pleat-skirt and long dark tights. Her boots were velvet and tall as her thighs.

Armitage’s jaw had ticked when he saw her, he glared jealously at Percy until the poor weasel-boy backed well off. Still, he looked determined not to start a row with her today. Calmly, he offered her his long coat, and when she refused it, he clenched his teeth and smiled thinly and folded his hands behind his back.

Now her teeth were trying to tattle on her with their chattering. May in the highlands was like winter in London, and she was regretting not taking his coat. The cold made her mood all the blacker.

She crossed her arms over her taut, aching nips and snapped, “Or the week-end?”

“I see,” elegantly, he lifted one eyebrow, “An imposition on my lady’s schedule, am I?”

_Oh. _Her stupid belly dipped treacherously whenever he called her that.

_My lady._

“It’s just- now’s my Magical History class and it’s the _only_ one I have perfect marks in. I’m rubbish at all the other subjects- charms… transfigures… _divinations-” _she seethed at the last one.

He scoffed. “I should hardly consider Divinations a proper class_-”_

“Well you might not, but my report does,” she spat. “S’so stupid. She’s always going on and on about _tragedy in my future_ and _a dark omen looming over my love life. _Like it takes a wet clump of tea leaves to figure out you and me are doomed.”

He snorted and smiled, as in actually showed a bit of white, straight teeth and some handsome wrinkles around his eyes.

Her heart skipped. Count _that_ as the first time she ever made him laugh.

“Anyway,” she went on, cheeks pinker and a bit more breathless, “less I can predict for her when Jupiter will succeed Venus in ascension or dissension or something, I’m going to get bad marks.”

“Shall I speak to Trelawney?” he asked her.

Her little tummy fluttered. She played unaffected at the thought of her dark Deatheater boyfriend taking up for her with her professor by giving her shoulders a shrug. “Don’t think it’ll make a difference. Honnesly, just the sight of you would prolly kill her.”

He tipped his head back and laughed.

Her chest swelled smugly as they crested the hill towards the outer grounds together.

She felt she was queen of everything, bugger the cold weather.

“Well then,” the smile he gave her was beautiful. Razor-edged. “_There _is your meaningful prediction, my love.”

Her smile slipped, the lightness she felt blew away on the next cold breath of wind.

_My love…_

He stopped at the rocky edge of the hillock and lilted his chin at the mammoth sprawl unraveling below them. Long, undulating fields of newborn heather and tall grass, like swathes of dusky emerald velvet and hunter-dark wool.

Wrapping her arms tightly about her middle, she stepped ahead of him, balancing her arches on the lip of a flat slate-stone, and stared sightlessly out at the grounds.

“I wish you wouldn’t call me that,” she said dully.

“How else should I call you?” he sounded guarded again. Remote.

She shrugged. “Dunno. How ‘bout, _my fiancé I don’t like to see very much, _or _that annoying little girl a hat told me I had to marry, _or _my least favorite burden in life-”_

He sighed tiredly, “Rey-”

“People like you don’t get what it’s like.” Beyond Hagrid’s comfortable little hovel, past his pumpkin patch near the forest, she could see the quidditch pitch and beyond it, the practice field. “I can’t even fly properly-”

She remembered the last time she tried. She practiced all of the lesson harder than anybody and never got but six inches off the ground. it was dark when Madam Hooch made her quit finally; at supper the Slytherin boys had mocked her until she left the great hall sobbing so bad Luna had to take her upstairs.

“The broom won’t come into my hand and even when it does- it’s like they can _sense _I’m not a real witch,” she was speaking wholly to herself now, looking miserably at the low wefts of white cloud in the blue sky, “my broomstick and my wand. Like they already know I’m a disaster-”

“You are not a disaster, my dear, surely-”

“I am though,” she croaked softly. Her lip tremored - in her heart there was a heaviness, like a load of stones she couldn’t lift. Bitterness rose burning up through her chest to her throat to choke her.

Her eyes stung. She wanted to go back her boarding school. Back to Madam Beaux. “I know that’s why you don’t like to come here. You can tell it, can’t you? That I’m a squib. That’s why the hat wouldn’t pick me for Slytherin, isn’t it? Because my magic’s no good-”

A pair of long dark arms enfolded her from behind.

Somewhere, she heard a little girl start to sob.

“Shh-shh-shh,” he soothed her. All around her, the creeping breath of the Highland spring was freezing, but behind her, he was _burning._

A full-bodied kiss from the sun.

“There now, angel, hush your weeping. There now. You know I cannot bear to see you so sad.”

His hot breath and tender words in her ear made her whimper. She forgot about prissy Percy and her bad magic and low marks. The cold in her small, tremoring hands seeped away from her. She closed her eyes and saw dragons and fire and the grown-up bodies of beautiful witches dancing in their flames instead.

“Armitage,” she got a gorgeous, queasy feeling in her tummy, like she was free-falling through the sky, “you’re burning up-”

“Whenever you are near,” was his quiet, rumbling reply.

The wind bayed furiously around them and over the sleeping surface of the far-off lake, but it may have well been blowing in another country. Because in that moment, she was deep, deep underground. Somewhere rich and dark and secret, safe and sultry. Surrounded by trinkets and treasures that sparkled and white bone skeletons that gleamed in a fire’s hot glaze.

“Never doubt your magic-” he was whispering to her from that dangerous, secret place.

She looked up.

His eyes high, high above were watching her. Beyond them, she saw his bright-burning hair with its loose strands stirred by the winds across his forehead and the seething cool-grey skies. His lips moved when he spoke so that she saw his beautiful white teeth and behind them, his flickering red tongue.

His words echoed like cave drips inside her fast-beating heart.

“In all my life, I have never met another witch – nor wizard, for that matter – with a power such as yours.”

His mocking stung her. She felt her heart wring in her throat. “You’re making fun of me, aren’t you-”

“Hardly.” On a dare, he closed his eyes.

He nuzzled her deeply at her frantic pulse point.

Her neck tilted. Her lashes flickered shut.

“You ensnare me. Your magic subdues me, _soothes me, _every time-”

She was turning, whether by his will or hers, she had no idea.

The touch of his chest bathed her like firelight; she felt dark watercolor memories surface inside her. Dream-shadows of his long hot tongue sliding, sliding down her throat and through her tender slit.

Her legs shook, her belly twisted shamefully.

She wanted him lay her down in cold long grass and make her spread her thighs.

He took up her hips and coaxed her even closer. Like rocks sliding far, far away in darkness, his chest rumbled with his deep, imperial murmurs against her small, tender breasts.

“I find I am quite enslaved to you, despite my best efforts to prove the contrary. You haunt me,” his heavy black leather hands on her body thrilled her. His eyes hovered on her parted lips. “If that is not magic, I daresay I do not know what is.”

Her heart leapt and scattered; she felt it beating everywhere inside her as she pressed up on her tiptoes and stretched her arms tentatively about his neck.

She was warm now, the winter around her completely forgotten. Yet her hands shook for an entirely different sort of reason as her fingertips strained to touch behind his nape.

He was so unbelievably tall.

Out of the corners of her eyes, she saw Percy marching towards them from his lookout spot on the next hillock. His face was gravely stern.

“If you are my slave-” she ventured, watching her man through her lashes, trying not to giggle and not to shake. He made her weak and he made nervous. He made her… something she’d never been before.

_Shy._

“Yes?” he drawled coaxingly. There was a small, sexy slant to his red lips and mirth glinting like knife blades in his eyes.

She took a breath and restarted. “If you _are_ my slave, then you have to do what I say.”

It sounded stupid the way it came out – _childish _– and immediately she wished she could take it back.

But her Deatheater only smiled, as darkly amused as a skull. “Gods save me.”

Percy was still charging ploddingly through the high grass, working himself up into a lather to tell them off.

Her pulse trilled wildly; she unlaced her fingers and curled them in the high, rich collar of his long coat. “I want you to kiss me.”

She added whiningly, “You never do.”

His grin widened. Oh, she wanted him to eat her alive.

Very slowly, he lifted his long, heavy hand from her hip and raised it right at Percy.

Her breath caught; she reached up and snatched his sleeve, but before she could say _stop, _the world did.

It actually did.

Percy’s mad footsteps went soft and slow-motion. He caught mid-stride coming down the hill. The clouds streaming like torn wefts of wool across the cold skies wound down and held still. Even the Highland’s cold lungs ceased to breath. The wind died, the whole world held its breath.

For her.

“Armitage-” she looked back over her shoulder at the eerie stillness in awe. Beyond the bright grass caught mid-wave to the lake lying in choppy, stagnant layers with starlings suspended above. Like little bits on the end of a mobile.

His magic was like no one else’s in world.

“How are you doing this?” she breathed, still holding his collar.

“It won’t last long.” His hand at her waist wound around her. He drew their bodies together and cinched them tightly. His was blazing, hotter than he’d ever been. So warm it almost stung to touch him when she reached up and trailed her trembling fingers wonderingly along his jaw.

His eyes went hooded and indigo. He turned his head and kissed her palm. “Tell me, how should I kiss you?”

Hot slip dribbled past her slit and soaked the gusset of her panties between her thighs. His touch, _his voice- _Her heart tried beating through her breast to reach him. She felt a knot tighten at the base of her throat, making it impossible to breathe. She felt afraid, drunk and manic.

She felt perfectly high.

“Like you love me,” she whispered.

“Don’t I?” his soft smirk stole her last breath away.

Then he bowed and kissed her lips.

His were gentle, maddeningly chaste.

She clutched the lapels of his cloak and pressed into him. He groaned and crushed possessively with his arm behind her back. Her blood whirled and it pounded. She felt light as a feather. She felt as if she could sink through the ground.

She wanted her thighs around him. She could picture it, her little body naked as the pretty witches’ dancing around their dragons in her dreams. Her tanned knees climbing around his pale waist as he arched and fucked into her, harder and faster and for forever and ever-

He broke the kiss panting and laid his forehead against hers. “You wicked girl.”

The wind shrilled suddenly through the slivers between them.

His magic was over, his concentration lost.

_Gods, can he see my thoughts?_

“Of course I can,” he smiled crookedly. His tone dropped to something sexable and dark, “And I ought to lash you, young lady.” Through her tights underneath her skirt, he squeezed her. “Perhaps another time.”

Her heart thundered as he kissed her quickly then straightened just in time for poor Percy who came thrashing off-kilter through the high, lush grass.

“It’s getting late,” he shouted crossly. His horn-rimmed glasses were cockeyed and his hair was mussed by the wind.

He fixed his frames over his ruddy nose and scowled.

“Quite.” Her man folded her hand in his arm. He guided her back through the waxing twilight towards the castle already glowing with candlelight.

The skies were indeed dark through the mammoth crystalline windows when at last they topped the marble staircase and rounded on the Great Hall.

Inside, the children were just settling down to dinner with their House tables. They chattering amongst themselves in the subdued fashion usual for the week before exams. Only the Gryffindors were in high spirits, the Weasley twin most especially. They wormed like a pair of excited labradors in their seats and roared crass jokes to one another for the amusement of their House.

The General recognized their charade for what it was - brilliance’s rail against the arbitraries of institutionalized life. He had attended Hogwarts in the age of their father and knew Arthur Weasley to be a wizard of exceptional capability. Whatever the profession he choose to squander in now. In fact the broodmare, Molly, had been quite the shrewd and clever witch as well. That the two of them frittered away their gifts so capriciously on pedestrian life was, the General perceived, endemic of the very philosophies which had eroded the core of pureblood society.

Frivolity.

Individualism.

_Self-indulgence. _

He observed the sons to be no wiser than their sire and lamented. The decline of the pure bloodlines aggrieved him; he vowed within himself that the sons he sired would not fall prey to futile whims.

Whatever their mother’s mongrel origins were.

“Oh. It’s supper-time, then,” his bride’s little murmur wafted up from his side. She stood rather anxiously with legs crossed precariously at her ankles and both her hands tucked safely within his arm. Her hair was slightly windswept and troubled out of its unusual style. Her gold eyes were bright and her round cheeks had a comely flush.

She looked positively lovely.

And every bit her tender age.

Together they made an unlikely spectacle inside the bright, hollow mouth of the Great Hall. He with his pale, imperial appearance. She as radiant as a sun-goddess and dressed like a muggle slut.

Death’s irreverent little summer child.

“Are you quite warm enough?” he asked her quietly, hoping she would at last take his coat. He had a private fixation with seeing her wrapped up in his clothing. Her warm, fragile skin in the coils of his dark, subtle damasks and smooth-grained wools. As he looked down on her impassively, he wondered not for the first time if it had pleased his ancestors to admire the delicate beauty of their witches against their hard scales.

Something in his eyes must have given him away, because she blushed and ducked her head.

“Yeah. I’m fine. Do you-” she hesitated. Her ankles uncrossed. She balanced on the outer edges of her boot soles and rubbed her lips together, stalling.

Their partings were almost always like this – uncomfortable. Long-drawn. Neither one of them knew how to leave the other.

_Because, _a voce hissed sensually from his hindbrain, _you are not meant to be apart…_

“Doyouwannasiddownwithme?” she said finally in a mumbling rush.

“I-”

It was his turn to stall.

His gaze ghosted over the tables and revealed a growing margin of others who were watching them. Nervous, sniggering students and wary faculty all stealing secret glances over their plates. At the high table, on the dais before the grand darkening windows, the Potions Master was regarding him closely. Grief and suspicion churning in the surface of his dark, damned eyes.

“- hardly doubt it would be appropriate, my angel,” the love-name came as naturally as the tenderness with which he refused.

Bella’s accusations came back to him.

He shook off their chill.

Her lip tremored before she chewed at it savagely. “Why not? Rosie gets to sit with all _her_ boyfriends-”

She jutted her chin to where her little companion-sister was sat between the Weasley twins in scandalous delight. Her cheeks were bright as her namesake, pretty mouth grinning rapturously as she scolded each them in turn. It was obvious the boys took their pleasure in thrilling and vexing her. She threw her head back and shrieked out a laugh that filled the hall.

Never had he made Rey laugh so recklessly. Nor had she looked at him with so much naked affection before.

An ugly jealousy wound inside of him; he rebuked himself scathingly for being envious of a pair of feckless young boys.

“Armitage?” his beloved piped beside him. She was staring up at him and clutching his arm. “Please won’t you sit with me, _please_?” she begged him openly, “Just this one time- I promise I won’t ever ask you again_-_”

He kept his hands one folded behind him and other holding its lapel. “I’m afraid not, my dove.”

Her face crumpled.

“Whatevah, then,” she whispered, straightening her spine. Her jaw tremored, but she spoke without shaking, “Can I go now? I’m hungry and my friends are waiting for me. I’m sick of talking to you, anyway. It’s such a waste of time.”

He sighed through his nose.

“My dear must we always end like this? Taking one step forwards and two back?”

She snorted venomously, not daring to blink her wet eyes roving blindly around the hall. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. You sound ludicrous- honessly, I can’t even lissen to you anymore. Just get away from me.”

Her hands still clenched his arm.

His mouth twitched, in spite of her backchatter.

He admired her pride.

More of the Great Hall had begun to notice them. The possessive ancestors in him bared their teeth and rattled their spines.

Shielding her with his body in a subtle sweep of black robes, he asked her, “Shall I call on you before examinations?”

She wouldn’t look at him. She glowered blankly at a corner of the great hall with wet, dazzling eyes. “I lit’rilly don’t even care.”

“Then I shall say good night.” He leaned down and kissed her temple.

Her hair smelled like the Highlands. Her skin was cool and soft. He memorized her little girl scent as he whispered, “Good night, my sweeting.”

She closed her eyes and forced herself not to follow his touch. “Choke.”

He stepped back and bowed.

She glanced at him. The look nearly broke his black heart.

He watched her dart away without another word towards her table, and take her seat beneath the gaudy red-and-gold banners between her friends.

His little Gryffindor. Of all the terrible wonders.

He left in a whisper of robes.

“Alright there, slim?” George asked her as she slipped into her normal place at the great table. Next to Luna, across from Rose and the twins.

“Yeah, how is the old Deatheater these days, slimson?” Fred followed up. _Slim _was the petname the boys had picked for her, on account of neither one of them thought she ate enough. The two were always passing along treats made for them by their Mum. They could be right gits sometimes, but normally she thought of them as sort of brothers. Big, stupid older brothers. With decent-ish hearts.

Her own heart hurt her cruelly – it did whenever her man left. She felt like the false skies swirling in the ceiling were pressing down on her. There was a heaviness in the pit of her stomach. It pulled her into a slouch.

“Whass wrong, dolly?” Rosie sat almost entirely in Fred’s lap with his freckled arm tight around her, smug as a bug in a pretty red lace dress that looked rich and totally posh. She had gold sparkles on her cheeks and a black velvet choker with a fake teardrop pearl. She had been eating double-handed dinner croissants dipped in syrupy butter while laughing as George did silly imitations of all the professors she didn’t like.

Now she was watching Rey attentively with soft, sympathetic love-eyes.

Rey wanted to leap across the table and slap her. She wanted to bury her head in her plate and cry.

Beneath the table, Luna’s soft, slender hand slipped their fingers together in Rey’s lap and held her.

Her lip trembled. She clucked haughtily and shrugged, “I’m fine. Well. Actually-”

She chose the absolute smallest bun from a bowl between them then maneuvered it very primly to her plate. “I’m rather furious. He’s so boring and stupid and inconsequential. A complete waste of my time-”

She plucked two green grapes from another platter and arranged them fussily beside her bun. “I told him so but he doesn’t lissen. I told him, _you’re annoying and don’t think I’ll marry you at all_. I think- I think the next time that he- the next time that he comes-”

Her throat gripped. She stared at the lonely arrangement on her plate and choked back a sob.

“Daddy says it’s perfectly normal,” Luna coo-whispered in her dreamy sing-song, “to feel a bit low after your soul-love leaves. Even if it’s just a very usual parting. There’s a song about it, the neebles used to sing. It’s very soothing. It goes like-” she started a low, mournful trill.

Rey winced and took her hand back. “I’m _not_ low. Actually- every step he takes away from me I feel bettah.” She lilted her chin bravely. It made the candles floating above them catch the gloss in her eyes without her knowing. “L-like I was saying, next time when he comes, I’m going to tell him to get stuffed. In front of everyone. The whole school. Then he’ll be so humiliated he’ll never- never come back.”

Rose and Luna exchanged worried looks.

Rey ignored them because they were stupid. Viciously, she tore off bits bun without eating them and counted silently to herself, _I hate him… _

_I hate him more… _

_I hate him… _

_I hate him more… _

_I hate… _

_I love… _

His walk to the Headmaster’s office was an uneventful one.

By now the students were used to seeing him; they parted in groups around his wake like water flowing around a monolith and kept their faces cast down. The ghosts avoided him altogether, Peeves most especially, for the poltergeist remembered him well from his years at the school. Only the Grey Lady, the Baron’s would-be betrothed, would sometimes to follow in his wake. Always a ways behind him, watching him with her sad, still eyes.

However, when he came to the end of the long, cathedral-ceilinged hallway that lead to the Headmaster’s chambers, he was utterly alone.

The stone gargoyle leapt away as soon as it saw him, landing in a low crouch and backing away slowly as it hunched and bared its fangs.

He eyed it coolly before sweeping up the spiral staircase two-stairs at a time.

“Albus,” he said when he’d reached the top of the stairwell and stepped inside the circular room.

The Headmaster sat behind his great desk in his purple velvet chair. He was polishing something very delicately with a fine suede cloth, his half-moon glasses perched on the very tip of his long nose. The baubles and trinkets surrounding him glimmered and tinkled. Behind him, the hat snored softly on its shelf.

He looked decidedly engrossed.

“I trust I am not interrupting anything,” the General’s smart black boots moved soundlessly over the floor. His long coat swept behind him like a serpent’s tail.

On its perch the phoenix stopped preening itself and crooned a warning as, on a marble pedestal by its claws, an amethyst and citrine chess set played itself out.

“It’s alright, Fawkes,” the old wizard swept his long emerald sleeve gently in the familiar’s direction. In his hand was the fine polishing cloth. “He comes in peace. Don’t you, General?”

“I wouldn’t say that,” the General smirked. Precisely, he folded his hands behind his back.

The Headmaster let out a low, sad chuckle. “No, no I suppose you would not.”

Jeweled fingers winking, he put down the cloth on the desk. “Now-”

He steepled his fingertips together and studied the General over his glasses. “To what do I owe this dubious pleasure, General Hux?”

“To whom, rather,” the General drawled. Slowly, he took a turn about the room, pausing at length to examine the different artifacts as he spoke. “I have just heard the most _fascinating _rumor-”

“Have you?” the Headmaster asked very quietly

“Indeed,” the General nodded, bending to inspect a silver self-playing lute, “Quite a fanciful one, I assure you. The source of which is a- shall we say… _unreliable _one. Nevertheless-”

He had come to a glass curio full of tiny dancing figurines made of sapphire and cerulean flames. The girl-like figures held hands and danced in and around one another, oblivious. “- they give me pause.”

He straightened and looked across at the Headmaster.

The old wizard was staring gravely back.

“These rumors,” he tilted his chin down so that their eyes could meet without a doubt, “they concern Lord Voldemort, do they not?”

“_Lord,” _the General scoffed, sneering, “I assume you mean _Tom_. Of course _Riddle _never sounded much like a family name. Not _our _kind of families, at any rate-”

Prejudice, old and treasured, burned within him. Violent. Ever-bright.

“Of course _Voldemort _sounds just as ludicrous,” he paused, seeing through Albus’s face for a moment to the beautiful girl who not an hour ago had spoken that very word. _Ludicrous. _

His beautiful mudblooded girl.

“I digress.”

He composed himself with a silent, subtle breath. “I came to see if there was even a granule of truth to this-”

“Rumor?” Dumbledore clarified. His eyes twinkled with a sudden, suspicious, nuanced delight. “From an… _unreliable source.”_

The General lifted his head high. He had the keen sense he was being adjudged. “Rather.”

As quickly as it came, the twinkle in the old man’s eyes went out.

He sat back. “I’m very sad to tell you, General, that the rumor is – without a shadow of a doubt – truth.”

Behind him, the General’s hands twitched. His Dark Mark throbbed.

_How can it be possible?_

“If anything,” the Headmaster continued, watching him somberly, “it is a gross understatement of what has already come to pass.”

Though he moved not a muscle, internally the General reeled. A thousand thoughts and memories raced one another for his attention, but one alone stood out diamond-clear from all the rest.

Her face, young and frightened. Staring out at him from the dark whirl of his thoughts.

“Are you very sure?” he asked softly. His voice was like a stranger’s to him. Dangerous, with a jagged, graveling edge. Something deep with him was waking, unwinding. Gathering to its great height and hissing smoke between its fangs.

Slowly, without looking away, the Headmaster withdrew the object he had been polishing when the General first arrived and placed it with a quiet _click_ on his desk.

The General’s heart kicked up and roared when he saw it.

A unicorn’s horn.

“Infinitely,” the Headmaster said.

The General did not take his eyes off the horn as he asked with deadly calm, “Where did you get that?”

“The Forbidden Forest,” the Headmaster’s answer was equally falsely serene.

The General’s gut kicked, he felt his heart fall through him as he whirled around and looked out through the lead-paned windows at the black shape of the forest looming beyond.

His face broke into a snarl. “_Tom Riddle _rises from the ashes so close to this school, and you didn’t think to warn anyone- to _tell me_-”

“My dear boy,” the Headmaster was back to his insidious sideways smiling, “I thought you would be delighted. You and your _anonymous_ source-”

“_That’s enough!” _In a flash of whirling black motion, the General seized the glass curio cabinet and sent it shattering thunderously to the floor.

The tiny dancing jewel-girls inside it screamed and ran scattering through the shards of glass.

The phoenix shrieked and beat its wings at him, but he was too incensed to care.

“This _demon_ hides himself here, on your grounds - the very grounds upon which you hold _my muggleborn bride hostage – _and it does not occur to you that it is in every way intentional? That he would not seek out his most powerful enemy at the epicenter of his stronghold unless he was driven - _compelled _by – the will to exact his revenge?”

The General’s heart clenched and wrung him, as violent images from the days of the Deathly Revels slashed themselves across his eyes. Women and girls torn apart like paper. Their screams drowning out the night.

He menaced towards the Headmaster surrounded by fissures of white-crackling light. His hands shook with rage.

“Do you know what a depraved animal like Riddle does to such a one as she? Do you have any idea, the torment? The _violation._ You- self-righteous scum,” he bore down. The shadows of his ancestors rose behind him with open maws. “You dangle her off a ledge as an incentive for my acquiescence. Hoping to tame me with _love. _I can assure you, _Albus, _you win no favor from me by putting her in peril. The _exact opposite, _in fact-”

“I do not seek your favors, General,” the Headmaster peered him down mildly over the rim of his spectacles, “nor to put your girl in any harm. Do please calm yourself.”

But the General’s face was _burning, _the vein on his forehead dancing a devil’s revel as he snarled through his immaculate teeth, “She is not yours to gamble with- She is _my_ bride, _my_ future. The mother of my bloodline. Whatever her filthy origins are.”

His hands on the desk sparked more white lightning as the phoenix thrashed and screamed frantically on its perch.

“She _belongs _to me, and you do not risk her. Or I shall rain fire upon this place the likes of which you _cannot_ _conceive.”_

“Tell me something, General-” the old fool folded his hands calmly over the unicorn’s horn on his desk.

This close, the General could see every constellation patterned in his bright-shining eyes.

“Why should Riddle want to harm young Rey for his revenge? She is a muggleborn witch of _unremarkable _origins, shall we call them? Her magical acumen is unexceptional. Pedestrian at best. _We_ share no personal connection, she and I. She carries with her no ties to the wizarding world at all, in fact- oh except to you, General. And you, well you were Riddle’s most devoted follower. A true believer in his cause. So then would he want to harm her, particularly? It’s a most peculiar assumption.”

Too late, the General realized he had stepped in and sprung a trap.

Slowly, he withdrew himself. His powers receded under control. They left behind a trace scent of burned sulfur and seared ozone. His heart tatted maddeningly; suddenly all the innocuous trinkets and tinkling music surrounding him seemed a sinister conspiracy.

He had played himself a fool.

The Headmaster’s eyes twinkled up at him demurely as he waited for his answer.

“His most devoted follower, was it? I see,” the General rearranged the rich, dark cuffs of his dress robes around his white wrists. “Is that what one reads in the _Defense Against the Dark Arts_\- the life and times of Armitage Hux?”

“Certainly his deeds,” the Headmaster smiled, “although, my suspicions are informed by a much more reliable source-”

The General’s eyes narrowed dangerously. His gut went coldly still.

“Who, pray?” he asked quietly.

The Headmaster dismissed his question with a frugal wave. “The dementors’ fear was not the reason why you were acquitted from Azkaban-”

“The details of my trial were sealed by the Ministry and locked away in Department of Mysteries,” the General adopted his usual, rigid posture. His voice was back to being cold and composed. “Therefore I’ll thank you to spare me your _suspicions_-”

The Headmaster continued, unperturbed, “- though there was testimony - compelling testimony, I gather - about what really took place that night in Godric’s Hollow. The night Tom Riddle was killed. There was a great light in the sky over the Potters’ townhome,” his jeweled fingers wavered the air above him, trailing glittering emerald robes, “It eclipsed the Dark Mark completely. As bright as the sun at midday. So they say.”

“People often have an imaginative way of remembering these things,” the General sneered.

“Oh certainly,” the Headmaster agreed with a convivial smile, “It is also said that, one could hear a sort of… roaring,” he shut his eyes. He concentrated intently, as if straining to hear the sound. “It was a fearsome thunder. Some described it as the roar of a lion-”

Over the rims of his halfmoon glasses, he met the General’s eyes. “But I wonder, if in this instance, a _dragon _might be more apropos.”

Something dark and hateful churned within the General as he remembered that fateful night.

“Is this your grand theory?” the General spoke imperiously. But inside him burned that dark, ravening hate. “That I – an Arkanian, of the line of Hux – halted the great purge of this diseased, mottled generation? _I _killed Tom Riddle outside the Potters’ house that night? _I_?”

“It makes for a wonderful twist, doesn’t it?” the Headmaster sat back and folded his hands over his chest.

“It is an absurd fiction,” the General spat.

His heart raced; he desired more than anything in that moment to escape the mad, knowing gaze of this old man.

The Headmaster gave a little shrug and smiled. “The more important question one wonders is – what will you do now that he has returned?”

The General’s jaw clenched.

He did not have an answer for that.

With a rageful little sniff, Rey snapped her spellbook shut.

She and Rose and Luna had been kneeling around the Turkish ottoman in their common room for hours, spellbooks open, supposedly studying for exams.

Really they’d been talking about Armitage and why Rey couldn’t marry him – he was cruel and cold and never told her he loved her – when the weasel-brothers showed up. Immediately they coaxed Rosie onto the sofa to sit with them. They were a couple of randy hippogriffs and Rey was sick to _death_ of them.

Of course Rosie did pretend to keep listening even after that they snatched her, but it was obvious she wasn’t. George’s hand kept creeping up her red lace skirt to tickle her; Rey could see now he was making gentle, circling motions on Rosie’s thighs. Meanwhile, Fred’s thick, harsh-looking fingers ghosted up and down Rose’s arm. Every once in a while, he’d nuzzle her with his big beak and peck her neck softly. Rosie’s eyes were half-closed now and her head kept lolling. She was falling asleep between them, and it made Rey positively mad.

How dare she rub her nose in her happiness, when Rey was just saying how hopeless she was.

Even Luna, good dolly Luna, who always took Rey’s side, was staring lost-fuly into the fireplace. Barely blinking and humming low and tuneless to herself.

Rey felt like she was speaking to no one. So what if she’d talk about Armitage a hundred billion times? She had to- he was everything. Her husband, her future. Her family. After Hogwarts, Luna and Rosie would go off with their soul-loves and leave her. She’d have no one but him, and she didn’t have him at all.

She’d never felt so alone.

“You okay, dolly?” Rose asked her froggily as Rey stood and shoved books and quill viciously into her bag.

Fred kept Rosie pinned with his arm around her belly and smiled over her shoulder at Rey. “She’s fine then, aren’t yah slim?”

“There’s a good girl, slimson, off to bed,” George nodded. His hands, Rey noticed, were working deep under Rosie’s skirt. “No sense losin’ any sleep over that silly troll. In the mornin’ you can send him a howler. That’ll teach him. Won’t it, Fred?”

“Absolutely, George.”

Rey looked one last time to Luna, but Lunabelle had made a triangle with her arm on the ottoman and laid her head down. Delicately, she traced the same section of brocade over and over. Completely lost in her own strange, beautiful world.

Rey’s heart ached. She took in everything for what it was.

_Dismissed._

Eyes stinging, she turned on her heels and clopped towards the stairs to their turret without another word.

“Rey, wait-” Rosie called after her weakly. Halfhearted and tremoring, she tried to push George’s hands away and sit up, “_Stop, _can’t you see she’s sad-”

But Fred rubbed his nose in her hair and whispered against her ear and slipped his hand in to join George’s. Rosie let out a shuddering little exhale and whimpered and then went very still.

Rey trudged the staircase alone.

Godric’s Hollow was very much a place time had forgot.

It was raining furiously; water sloughed off the eaves where the General stood and beat a violent rhythm against the cobblestone. Wizards and witches with close-gathered collars hurried past him with only the occasional halfhearted glance.

But he had drawn the hood of his black cloak over his long coat to avoid being recognized.

Behind him, the pub that sat across from the Potters’ townhome was warm and alive. Its crude-paned windows glowered pleasantly, bright yellow light cut a vivid slash across the cobblestone from its open mouth. Inside he could hear wizards crowing greetings and bits of petty news to one another, as witches with shrill voices flirted and cackled back. The air roiling out from the bar was roasting and thick with the scents of fresh ale and rich home cooking. It charged out into the cold, shrieking gales that buffered the rain in sheets and dissipated into cool wafts of steam that drifted over him, disguising him further from view.

He peered through the fast-falling rainfall at the Potters’ residence, tracing its gaunt, grey shapes as he remembered a very different sort of night. When the air was cool but not cold and the sky clear and full of far-blinking stars. Back then the streets were empty, the windows of every shop and house and even this pub deadened and watchful. As if the buildings themselves could fear.

That night he stood under that very eave in his long black coat and observed Tom Riddle pouring down the narrow steps of the Potter house. He watched Riddle raise his right arm and summon a Dark Mark, triumph and madness dancing all around him as he threw his head back and laughed.

The memory of him sickened the General even now.

But Riddle’s laughter was not what the townspeople of the Hollow remembered about that fateful night. It was the cool, clear skies churning up a fire that swallowed all the white shivering stars. A roaring like thunder, like a thousand thunders. A devastating flame that tore through this very street like rapids over a fall.

And against their bright-orange violence, the shadow of a wingspan. A single dark figure in an imperial coat with a burning white skull.

_Purge indeed, _thought the General as he took one last look at the dark windows staring back at him like a pair of sorrowful eyes.

If he was to do what was required, he would see he had something to gain from it.

And he had to visit her first. To see her…

He Apparated into the night.

Rey woke up sort of all-at-once and really not-at-all. She was still in her jumper and pleat skirt and boots, her bag spilled next to her. Bits of loose hair stuck to her still-drying cheeks. She’d cried with her face in the comforter until she was too exhausted to cry. Now her head throbbed. She couldn’t exact use all her limbs at once.

Straining against the thick, suede darkness, she peered through the canopies to see if her dollies were asleep in their beds. Luna was tucked in beneath her covers with her knealze-doll under her arm and her thumb between her pale lips. Her blonde hair looked pearl-silver in the slivers of pale light sieving through the cracks of their door.

Other than that, the room was pitch dark.

Rosie’s bed looked cold and lonely.

Rey lit a small candle by her bedside with her wand and hid its flame from Luna’s face with her hand.

She wondered where Rose was.

The windows were black-paned and pattered by rainfall. The steady, pittering tattoo paced Rey’s jumbled heart. She couldn’t stop picturing Armitage and the way he looked against the grey skies this evening. It made her livid that he was the last thing she thought of before she fell asleep and the first when she woke up. She even dreamed of him, strange dreams of him standing in a dark cloak with the hood drawn against a bright window, watching rain fall from the eaves onto the walk.

She licked her chapped lips and decided she needed a drink of water.

She’d cried herself dry.

With a silvery hush, she slipped down the comforter, wincing when her boots made a dull sound on the rug.

Luna didn’t wake, though.

Rey’s ever-lasting roses on their pedestal in the center glimmered in the passing candlelight like fresh blood.

They made her ache for him. She rubbed her flat, tender chest as she blew out her taper and slowly creaked open their door.

He felt… near her, somehow.

She crept on shaky, sleepy legs down the stone turret steps.

The great room was silent as a tomb.

Low-glowing ruby light from the fireplace’s last embers made long shadows of the furniture against the walls. The air inside the common room was warm and thick and smelled like reams of parchment and ink quills and sweet cakes. And something else delicate and humid Rey couldn’t guess.

Her heart pounded strangely. She kept swallowing as she crept blindly down the spiral staircase, until at last she could see properly from the around the curved wall at the fourth stair.

What she saw on the sofa made her heart stop completely.

Her Rosie, red lace skirt shucked up around her bellybutton, panties off. Round, white thighs wide open. Her smooth, perfect body glowed in the ember light. The neck of her dress was stretched down beneath her pink nipples. Fred – Rey was almost sure it was – was kneeling on the cushion between her calves with his hand on her waist. His thick, rough fingers were moving in and out of her between the smooth, puffy lips of her glistening sex. His mouth was open, curved upwards at the corners. He was working her slowly, deeply, pressing and holding up to his knuckles as Rosie’s round belly tremored and she whimpered and whined.

Her panties were shoved into her mouth, Rey realized. Her stomach dropped, she felt her blood buzzing in every vein of her body at the blissed-out look on Rose’s heart-shaped face. Behind her, George – Rey knew it was George – was playing with her tenderly, like she was a tiny kitten with just-opened eyes. Stroking his own big fingers at the top of her shining slit in a gentle back-and-forth motion, as his other huge hand fondled and teased her breasts two at a time. Rosie’s hands were clenched tight in his hair and in her skirt bunched over her belly, her sweat glittered in the low ruby light. She looked like a painting. She looked porcelain and precious.

Rey had never felt so frightened and or so jealous. Her heart skipped, murmuring as she listened to how they talked to Rose. All soft-clicking tongues and breathy bits of _good girl _and _that’s it, sweetheart _and _just gettin’ started, aren’t we, luv?_

“Love me a little muggle girl, don’t you, Fred?” George teased her sweetly, rawly, tugging one pink swollen nipple as the other hand lifted her skirt a little higher and strummed lazily across her quaking ribs.

“Def’nitely,” Fred was fucking her faster with his big fingers, holding her weak-struggling thighs apart with his huge paw and kissing them between pants. Her cunny squelched loudly around him, slick dripped between her thick, pink cheeks into a dark pool on the sofa and covered him past his knuckles down to his wrist.

Rosie’s eyes rolled back suddenly, she squealed and kicked softly and tried to worm trembling out of George’s grip.

“Coming again, isn’t she?” George murmured grinning.

“Yeah,” Fred breathed, bewitched.

“How many’s that now, mate?”

“Seven.”

“Seven,” George nuzzled Rosie’s neck and nipped her earlobe, “spoiled rotten’s what you are, pretty girl.”

“Fuck she feels good when she comes,” Freddie groaned lowly. He laid his forehead on Rose’s chest and took one of her puffy nipples in his mouth. His fingers fucked her even faster when she moaned for him.

Her muffled cries through her panties climbed higher and higher, her eyes flickered and rolled around and around her skull.

Rey’s thighs squeezed tightly and her eyes went wide, as Rose locked up like a statue and came sousing Fred in crystal-bright slip. Her head swam listening to her friend squeal in earnest. Her mouth felt full of cotton and she couldn’t remember the last time she took a breath.

She watched Fred lift his head up and pull the panties out of Rose’s dry mouth in time to stick his sleek tongue down her throat. Just as George pulled his brother’s fingers out of Rosie’s swollen, overworked little slit and replaced them with his own. Fred broke their tongue-fuck and leaned back on his haunches while George took his fingers not buried in her pussy and gently turned her face towards him. He kissed her softly, greedily, lapping at her insides as Fred’s cock finally came out.

It was red, glistening and purple-crowned, weeping precum. Throbbing and massive in the grasp of his huge hand.

“Jaysus,” he gasped, big shoulders shuddering as he stroked himself, “I need to come.”

Rey’s eyes went wide and wider till they hurt from stretching; her heart hammered like it was going to explode. She was hot and cold all over, and shaking. She wanted to leave, now. She wanted to stay forever.

Most of all, she wanted Armitage to lie her down next to them and do the exact same thing.

“C’mere, poppet,” Fred coaxed Rose whisperingly, as George helped mold her boneless, quaking body up onto her hands and knees, fingers still buried deep in her cunt. Rosie’s eyes were glazed and glossy, her cheeks bright red, mouth wet and slack.

Her palms and knees dug into the soft cushions of the sofa. Her red dress was like a ballerina’s skirt gathered around her waist.

Fred took her shining black hair in his fist and tipped her head back to kiss her, a long filthy kiss as his brother pressed in close to her round, gleaming bum and fucked his fingers again.

Rose moaned and whimpered and rode back at him. She didn’t seem the least bit frightened of Fred’s big cock bobbing against her chin.

Not even when he drew his tongue from her mouth and guided her to it.

Rey’s gut clenched; her horror and fascination and envy reached fever-pitch as she watched her dolly greedily lick and suck. The brothers were stroking her all over her small body and praising her. Their love was clumsy and gentle, instinctual and adoring. Two brother lions clambering all over their baby-cub mate.

Rey’s chest ached. She pictured Armitage and his ever-cold, distant demeanor. She blinked and felt her lashes were wet.

She glanced away from them into the corner. Then everything went wintery white.

Her blood rushed, roaring like a far-away waterfall. Her heart stopped and wouldn’t restart.

There, inside the shadows, with his long arms crossed elegantly and leaning one shoulder against the wall, was her dragon. He was watching her watch the scene on the sofa with dark amusement glinting in his cold blue eyes.

Dressed in long, sleek, imperious black, he looked exactly the way he did in all her dreams.

Dangerous.

And beautiful.

_“Armitage-” _her breath snagged. Her stomach dropped.

He put his finger to his lips.

She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t blink, as he ghosted across the room with his smooth, elegant stride. Inside the ember light, his hair slicked down against his skull was blood red, his face shone like polished bone. He flowed soundlessly past the lovers on the sofa totally unnoticed, his long, sensual mouth wet at the seam and coiling like the tail of a scorpion into a smirk.

Her heart beat in her throat louder than any sound she’d ever heard before as seamlessly he mounted the first of the turret’s stone steps.

Immediately, his great height blotted her view of the great room. Like a plague swallowing up the sky. He seemed to fill the narrow stairway with his hot, dark-crackling energy. His magic wound around hers jealously, caressingly-

She gushed shamefully between her thighs.

The wet, sensual sounds of the trio were beginning to filter back to her as tenderly, almost contemplatively, he took her hand in his black leather glove.

Slowly, he turned her wrist and pressed a soft, peeling kiss to her rabbit pulse.

She made an absolutely humiliating sound.

“Missed me, my sweeting?” his dark murmur shook the world and her with it. Her hand slipped through his leather with a hush. “I thought I might find you sleeping-”

He glanced over his shoulder.

Past his beautiful wraith figure, she saw in soft-focus Rosie sucking Fred’s cock on the sofa as George bowed over her, still fucking her roughly on his fingers, and kissed her nape.

“- but I see you decided to take in a show.”

She was touching him without realizing, her small hands sliding trembling up his chest. The smooth grain of his black robes and his tight definition below them made her cunny gulp mercilessly. As if to suck him inside. Her breath sawed scattered and raw past her dry tongue; she tugged pitifully at his shoulders and whined. “Armitage-”

His big hands taking her little waist made her feel weightless.

Calm.

“My poor girl,” he bowed his head and kissed her one cheek. Then the other. His body drifted closer, sealing out the light. “You ought to be in bed, my angel.”

Her lashes flickered at his low-roiling voice. “I- couldn’t go back to sleep, I- missed you.”

“Ah.” He arced a trail of lingering kisses across her brow.

Her arms wound him. She closed her tired, aching eyes.

His leather hands began to pet her exhausted, tremoring body. His touch was so gentle; she forgot all her promises never to speak to him again and burrowed her face in his neck. He was burning up like usual and smelled wonderful. Like rain and forests on fire. Like secrets and expensive cologne.

She held onto him tightly and whimpered, “Please can’t you stay?”

“If you like. But only tonight. And I won’t take you,” he nuzzled her temple, “you’re still far too young.”

Puzzled, she asked, “But take me where?”

He smiled against her hair. “There now, no more chatter. Let me look at your pretty face.”

She tipped her chin up, and tried to flinch at his hot blue gaze.

His hands hypnotized her with their firm leather touch; he stroked her everywhere, lingering where she needed him to without her having to ask. Her breasts. Her belly. Her wet little thighs. He made her legs go to jelly and her heart beat frantically everywhere at once. He kissed her too as he touched her, long, chaste kisses on her lashes, the bridge of her nose. Like he was mapping her face with his kisses.

She hung limp off his neck and panting rawly. A tiny kitten in the hands of her owner as he stroked her soft, downy mound with his thumb.

“My little girl likes to spy, does she?” his words that made her belly twist and shiver. His hot breath bathed her neck. “Naughty thing-”

He kissed her throbbing pulse.

Her lashes flickered; she made a breathy, needy sound.

“I could do things to you that would make their amateur display look like a child’s animation,” he spoke directly into her ear.

Her cunny gulped and slicked shamefully. She clung on for dear life as her knees gave out.

“Shall I give you a preview? Oh I think I will-”

Finally, he took her mouth.

His kiss wasn’t like George or Freddy’s. It was slow and controlling. Deep and dominating and smothering.

Like she wanted his love to be.

His tongue slipped greedily inside her and stroked every part of her. She suckled him anxiously, instinctually, hoping to please him. Her lips moving out of tempo in a scramble to keep up.

He took the last step below her so that their bodies mimicked the sensual slotting of their mouths.

His was log, hard and slender. Terrifyingly tall. She was soft, tender femininity. Fragile. Small.

His hands snuck around her waist and sought her bum beneath her skirt.

He groped and squeezed her mercilessly, groaning into her mouth.

The sensation and his obvious pleasure made her belly swoop and flutter. Their kiss was never-ending; he pushed deeper and deeper inside her, filling her with slick, flexing muscle in the back of her throat. She whined and mewled and pressed into him harder. His hands on her bottom through her tights was boundless, almost too rough.

He bowed her back in a seamless motion and reached deep between her thighs from behind. His thick leather fingers pressed into her crease and she-

She cried out into his mouth.

He kissed and stroked her. Back and forth…

Back and forth…

She was quaking; the shake in her belly was building and building into something. Her eyes slipped open; she stared glossy and unseeingly past him at the black-shadowed ceiling as he teased her plump, swollen folds and tongue-fucked her mouth.

_This is heaven, _her heart whimpered. She wanted it to go on and on and on and on-

Her small body jerked and trembled violently as one of his hands her traced up her waist and palmed her tiny rosebud breasts.

He squeezed her gently, testing her softness, then thumbed her nipples. The sensation was liquid, electric. Tingling-fissuring-bright.

He was killing her, _killing _her with goodness. She wanted- she wanted-

Against her belly, she could feel a shape of something big and beautiful. A heavy pillar of hot stone.

_His cock…_

She had made him hard for her.

In the great room, Rosie suddenly cried out.

Rey’s eyes rolled back; she came all over herself like a shameless little slut. Letting her big, mean Deatheater fuck her mouth and rub her pussy.

She hung slack and conniptioned in his arms.

His tongue withdrew from her trailing thin crystal stands of saliva. He watched her come gasping and whining with a soft, satisfied smirk.

“So beautiful,” he whispered, tracing her face adoringly with his blue stare. “I have the loveliest little mudblood in all the world.”

His slur should have hurt and humiliated her. Instead her blood crackled and sparkled at his praise.

Slowly, he dipped his head and loved her pulse leaping wildly against her neck with his wet lips.

“Again,” she whimpered greedily. Her fingers twisted in his tightly slicked hair. “I want it again. _Please_-”

“Careful, my angel,” his gloved hand working her breast slid dangerously down her body and up her skirt in the front.

His voice was black velvet midnight, “Begging so prettily is an excellent way to end up with a bellyful of my heirs.”

He cupped and squeezed her throbbing mound.

Her eyes were moving behind her eyelids; she saw specters of white fizzling lights that weren’t there.

Sugar plum visions of cradles and prams and pretty blankets full of darling babies swam in time with her heart pounding. She loved, _loved _dollies and playing mummy. And Armitage would never go away from her again. He’d hold their babies and let her crown him with chained daisies; she’d wear white dress and always be beautiful and thin. He’d gather up her skirt whenever he wanted and put his big, big cock inside her and fill her up with more babies on a blanket under the blue sky. She wouldn’t be allowed to tell him no-

“My my,” he rasped suddenly, sounding hoarse and barely-controlled, “What an _active _imagination you have, little girl.”

His fingertips traced strange shapes into the sopping gusset of her leggings, making her shudder and flush as he asked, “And what would Madam Pomfrey say, I wonder, when she sees you’ve split your little first year pussy open on a grown wizard’s cock?”

“_Artimage,” _she shuddered into another forbidden glimpse of heaven.

Suddenly, there was a cool draft between her thighs.

They were slick with hot slip from her gushing cunny. Her tights had fallen down her legs sighing as if they were too big for her and were now puddled around her boots.

She choked on nothing as he sucked her pulse and stroked her throbbing, naked slit with his thick gloved fingers.

She stared open-mouthed at the shadow-ceiled sky and felt her heart beat at the base of her throat.

“Y-yes,” she whimper, as his black leather fingertip circled dangerously around her tight clenching opening, “oh yes- please, yes- _uhhn_…”

His fingers - his thick, beautiful leather fingers – pressed two together inside her hot virgin cunt.

She was wet, _so wet, _but it didn’t matter. He had to force his way in as her body resisted. She clenched and bit her teeth and shook as he wormed and shoved deep inside.

The stretch, the white hot _aching _stretch, made her feel like she was floating.

“That’s it, there’s my sweetheart,” his hot breath on her neck was electric. He kissed lovemark he’d made, then the tender indent in front of her ear, then her temple. He caught her trembling tear falling down her cheek. “You loved it so well the last time, as I recall-”

His thumb made a soft, pendulous sweep across the top of her slit, rasping her aching bud.

She bucked, flashes fluttering helplessly at the smothering sensations. His fingers slowly fucking in and out of her. His leather thumb teasing her clit back and forth. The wet shape of his smirk against her pulse point. His liquid whispers pouring down her ear.

She panted and whimpered like a pup, “What you mean- lah-last time- _ahnn!_”

Her legs trembled, caught in her tights wading around her boots, as his fingers fucked her a little harder. Making obscene sounds in her wet baby cunt.

“Don’t you remember-” he stroked her a little faster and teased the lobe of her ear with his tongue.

She mewled and convulsed and clung to him.

“- when I kissed your little cunt-” his thumb made a purposeful circle around her clit throbbing like a second heartbeat, avoiding the little dip where she needed him most to _touch-_

“- right here?”

“N-no…” her voice sounded so pathetic. So small and far away.

To her shame and confusion, her belly clenched trembling and she felt a wad of slip too big to be normal trickle hotly out of her cunny between the knuckles of his glove.

“What a shame. It’s one of my most favorite memories,” he bent his head to examine his black hand sliding inside her pink, swollen folds, “your little thighs on my shoulders, pink first-year pussy open for my tongue. I remember you wearing black crinoline-”

Her mind scrambled, reeling, but it was useless. All she knew was the sharp leather slide of his big, big fingers fucking her tight little hole. She was dripping- _everywhere- _and it was pattering. Onto her clothes and the stone step behind her as she rocked, clutching onto him, legs shaking like a newborn lamb’s.

She was so close to coming again, and wanted it to last forever. Wanted the hurt inside her walls to stop. The tighter her tummy clenched, the more his big fingers hurt her. She drooled slick tinged the faintest bit pink onto his wrist.

“Worked ourselves into quite lather, have we, my angel?” his tone was so misleadingly mild. He was panting, the barest profile she could see with his head bowed down was open-mouthed.

He looked like a demon. Like an angel-

Her thighs quaked violently. She wished he would lay her down so she could-

“Armitage,” her breath shook as she whimpered, “I- you’re going to make me come-”

“So come then,” his sweet acid coax turned her insides to liquid fire. He fucked her harder on her fingers, relishing her wince, and smiled like a skull. “Spread your little thighs and come.”

Her boot soles made a hushed, desperate scratch on the stone grit as she buried her face in his dark shoulder and strained her legs apart against her tights.

“There’s a good little mudblood. Do what I tell you. Hold onto me-”

She wound her arms around his neck and clung to him as something molten and vicious wound her up.

She felt weak, dizzy. Like she was falling. Like she wasn’t, couldn’t be real.

She squeezed him everywhere, afraid to let go of him.

_I’m unraveling-_

“Amh’tage, it hurts-”

“My sweet one,” he fucked her harderfaster_harderharder_\- “My precious little love-”

_Love. _

Her legs caved completely.

He caught with her his long, hard arm around her waist and cinched her tightly as she came crying and choking into his neck. She soaked his fingers, shivering and seeing starlight in the darkness of her eyelids.

He stroked her over and over-

“So much pretty slick,” he whispered, watching her pussy shudder and gulp at his black leather touch.

“Stop,” she whimpered, almost sobbing. She didn’t know why she was crying, except that her cunny hurt and felt too sensitive and wonderful. Her head swam like a lake for of shimmering stars.

“I know, I know,” his gloved hand not fucking her stroked her back tip to tail. He was still moving his fingers inside her, very slowly, very gently, in time with her clenching.

“It hurts-”

“Shh-shh-shh, my adored one. Sweeting. I only want to stretch you a little. That’s all. There you are, stay very still. Good girl…”

_Good girl-_

Finally, he lowered her to the stone steps with his hand behind her head. She was shivering, feverish and now completely naked without knowing how. Her body was wet with slick and sweat and her weeping.

He pulled back and admired her, his bright white-blue eyes trailing covetously over every inch of her flushed, glistening skin to where his fingers still twisted slowly in and out of her cunt.

Her silver sweater, she saw fuzzily out of the corner of her eye, lay in a pile of unwound yarn by her side.

Her belly flexed and concaved and trembled with each time he pushed into her. Her collar bones stained up, up, up against her skin in an arch.

“Spread your legs,” he whispered.

Shaking, she touched her heels together and opened her thighs.

“Very good, Rey.” He leaned over and kissed her tremoring mouth.

Over the sound of it, she heard the quiet whip of laces being pulled through their eyelets- then felt a heat like the sun brand her slick inner thigh.

She licked her chapped lips and croaked, “Wh-what is tha-”

“Shhh. No more tears, angel,” he slipped his fingers from her cunt.

She felt raw, aching and empty. Stretched open.

She wanted him to fill her back up.

Slowly, he lowered his body to hers until they touched.

His thick, heavy cock fell like a burning column across her split-open slit and she whimpered. He cupped her face with his ungloved hand.

“Look at me,” he whispered.

He started to rock the solid, rigged length of himself through her swollen pussy lips when she did.

“Yes, that’s it-”

He kissed her cheeks, her lashes, her open mouth.

The pressure on her pussy felt tremendous, almost hurting. His veins stimulated her oversensitive clit.

She clung onto his shoulders as the stone staircase became sweltering. Hot and humid as a greenhouse while he made soft, gentle love to her mouth. His kisses were ecstasy. They were magic.

She loved him.

She loved him.

She did.

He was panting, stroking himself faster, when she got up the nerve to slip her hand between their bodies and touch the head. It was broad – too broad to ever fit inside her – and spongey. It leaked hot, wet slip onto her skin.

He hissed like a snake and nuzzled her. When she squeezed him, he chuffed and bathed her with his fast-flickering tongue. “Good witch, please your master-”

She came in a sudden, soft-sparkling rush.

He groaned and came all over her. Hot, scalding streaks of cream from his slit that coated her tiny, abused little opening as he braced himself on his forearm above her and painted her pussy white.

She felt dizzy, dazzling. Glazed in something dangerous and beautiful and alive.

He watched with cold sparkling eyes as she touched it tentatively with her fingertips.

“My little witch likes to play in cum, does she?” he smirked, and kissed her when she nodded frantically, _“Yes-_”

Her body tingled. His tongue touched hers way back in her throat.

Their lips pulled away trailing thin, glittering strands of saliva. He panted, “Put it in your pussy.”

Obediently, she gathered up a gob from her bellybutton with her fingers, watching the glossy white web between them in ropes, and slipped it inside her sore, aching sex.

Instantly, she felt soothed there, where his big mean fingers had stretched her too much.

They kissed lazily on the staircase until her eyes grew too heavy to open and her body went slack and pleasantly numb. She buzzed faintly everywhere his come touched her. She sensed his big bare hands trailing fingertips all over her breasts and her thighs. She felt wonderful. She felt like royalty.

She felt beautifully, beautifully stoned.

In the common room, Fred and George were snoring softly. She could hear Rosie mumbling in her sleep like she always did.

“Time for bed, I think,” her man whispered. His voice seemed right up there with the stars.

She tried telling him, _I’m not sleepy, _but she couldn’t speak and yawn at the same time.

He cleaned her and carried her measuredly up the turreted like a baby bride, her boots still caught in her tights dangling over his arm. The ruby light of the great room got fainter and fainter until they turned the last corner into darkness.

She wouldn’t let go of him as he touched her down to the covers. She clutched his neck so that he had to pry them apart.

“I don’ want you to go,” she whined softly, so that she wouldn’t wake Luna.

“There now, I’m only removing my clothes.” He had to coax her by running his big hands all over her body so that she’d lay down.

Outside her tower, the rain had stopped and the clouds were parted like silver curtains. Moonlight shone a thin bridal veil through the beveled panes of glass.

She laid back slowly on the comforter and watched every move he made as she bargained whisperingly, “Will you please stay till I fall asleep?”

He toed smoothly out of his boots then stepped out of his trousers. Her heart skipped watching them fold themselves neatly into a pile with his cloak by her bed. He wore only a long black silk undershirt that laced across his chest.

“I fear that shall be any moment,” he grasped her boots collared in her tights and panties smiling. Gently, he pulled the lot off and set them down.

Her small tan body shone naked at him from the red coverlet like a pearl.

“The gods made you too beautiful,” he whispered, looking down on her. He sounded choked. “Poor little girl.”

Her belly buzzed and fluttered sublimely. He did love her. He _must._

“It’s you who’s poorly, Ahm’tage-” she goaded quietly, almost too tired to get out the words.

She wasn’t a fairy girl… or a paper doll…. she was a Griffyndor.

_A lioness. _

She lilted her little chin. “- cause I own you now.”

“Do you?” he eyed her red, swollen pussy slit and smirked.

“Yeah,” she breathed. Everything about him glowed in the wan moonlight. He was _beautiful. _She was falling asleep. “You’re… my dragon…. The hat says so…. so you’re stuck….”

His big, tall figure folded over. He gathered her into his arms and laid them down. “Oh, I like it very much.”

She smiled into his chest.

“I had to see you tonight,” he whispered. In the darkness, his voice sounded strangled. “Our squabble- I had to earn back your good graces. Before-”

Her eyes were so heavy she couldn’t open them; she reached up slowly, blindly, and stroked his face.

“Shh, go sleep, Tage.” She yawned.

Her legs stretched. Her toes curled and cracked like a kitten’s and relaxed. She wound her arms around his neck and nestled in for the sleep of her life.

“I used to hate you,” she murmured, “But now… maybe… we’ll be… alright…”

“I hope so.”

Like a leaf floating softly, she sawed back and forth, down and down, into sleep.

Night held the Forbidden Forest inside its black, mist-toothed maw.

The General stepped soundlessly through the wet slur, able to make his way without the moonlight. His pupils pressed out against the boundaries of their cold irises; they showed him in spectrums the bodies of the trees and the creatures that crept in their midst.

Liquidly, he slipped amongst their shadows.

Darkness draped him like a veil so that only his hair glinted preternaturally against the night. His long coat swung pendulously around his boot heels like a great black tail, leaving a trail of whispering leaf rot in his wake.

Owls screamed in their nest above him. A centaur’s hooves pounded nearer and nearer then halted, and canted away. He felt the eyes of the beasts and the nigh birds watching him from the canopy and from the shadows.

He made his way towards the heart of the forest, letting the mournful trail of his ancestors’ counterparts be his guide.

The purity of unicorns and their magic was as well-known throughout the wizarding world as the dragons’ perversity and greed. Their tremors lured him through the darkness; he could taste their grief in the air.

Through the thickening darkness, he saw an enclave.

There, in the mossy basin swathed by mist, was a wraith.

It was feeding off the neck of a still-living mare.

She shrieked and thrashed when she sensed him coming through the thick mist. Her hooves tore at but could not find purchase in the soft, wet moss.

“Tom.”

He drew to the top of the basin and stopped his boots on a flat stone.

His gloved hands he folded behind his back.

The figure whipped up its face and hissed at him. From its stretched, lipless mouth, it dripped silvery blood.

“So it is you,” the General smiled. “Tom Riddle, rapeson. Heir to absolutely nothing.”

“Generallll…” the figure hissed seething. It had no limbs to speak of; it gathered its black mass spread out in the shallow moss well and rose up through the mist.

Its eyes were like a serpents, it bared its fangs and hissed it him hatefully. “Commme to killll me, dragonsssson?”

“Haven’t I already? Or would you call this-” the General gestured with one hand, “_alive_?”

The wraith flinched at his motion, then hissed again. “I wasss never gone…”

“Oh I’ve heard,” he inspected the knuckles of his glove.

High above him, far away from the horizon, beyond the forest’s trees, the sky had begun to redden like a false sunrise. Darkness bleeding to light.

“And why have you come here now?” he asked the figure.

“I sssseek resurrection,” its slit-nostrils flared at the gathering scent of sulfur. It cowered lower into the mist and turned its hood up warily at the sky. “I ssseek the Ssssorcerer’s Stone….”

_Ah. _

So that was what the old sap was hiding here in the castle. Behind the General’s bride.

“Clever fool,” he murmured, as the sky above them began to churn.

A hot breath blew seductively through the body of the forest, carrying with it the stench of ruin and char.

“We could rule togethhhher, thissss time…” the wraith drew closer. Inside its hood, its pale face was strained and taut. “Our kind, the mugglesssss. We can rule allll of them, you and I…”

Armitage smiled the grim, fanged smile of his ancestors. The last thing seen by so many great wizards before they met their fiery end.

“I have no desire to rule the unclean masses. Nor you, filthy mudblood wretch.”

The wraith rattled and sank sharply back.

“Oh I do hate them,” his fist still behind him closed slowly, so that the leather creaked in his palm. “The magicless. They are a pollution, a _cancer. _They destroy everything they touch. Their kind must be purged, before our race drowns in their _infection_-”

He thought of his own pretty mixedblood he left sleeping in her tower. His little mudblood queen.

The skies cracked and fissured.

“-and we shall not be led by any more of their _mongrel aberrations. _Least of all _you, _Tom. The half-blood hatechild of disgraced witch-”

The wraith lunged snarling.

Another breath blew suddenly through the forest, this one faster and hotter than a flash of lightning. It scorched the mist and set the wraith on fire.

The General reached his hand towards the sky.

His long coat billowed in the hellwind that whipped around him. It rose up behind him like a pair of great black wings.

“As I told you in Godric’s Hollow-”

He brought his hand down like a gavel.

Fireballs shrieked screaming like the roar of dragons from the churning, flaming night. They struck one after the other, after the other into the moss well before the wraith could escape their wraith. Their forked-tongued flames climbed higher and higher.

The General blazed in their light.

“There can be only one king.”

Rey woke to the predawn. The sky was smoky, rosy-orange at its hem. It glowered beautifully on the wet surface of the glass panes.

Rosie was in bed with Luna. The two girls held each other, bare as kittens, wrapped up in the covers Rose had drug off her bed.

Rey climbed down sleepily and trod over. She kissed Rosie’s cheek, which was tacky with dried tears, before she slipped into bed behind Lunabelle.

Luna turned in her arms and burrowed closer, her hands folded together against her thin, pale chest. Rose shuffled closer too and laced her fingers together with Rey’s.

Her eyes opened. They were dark and frightened and secretive. They were only eyes Rey had known all her life.

“I think I did something horrible,” she whispered, lip trembling.

Rey smiled and nodded eagerly. “S’okay. Me too. We’re bad girls, now. It’s brilliant-”

Rosie didn’t smile back.

“Go to sleep, we’ll have puddin’ for breakfast,” Rey closed her eyes, “We’ll sort it all out, I swear.”

“Really?”

“Double-swear.”

They both nestled into Luna’s soft white curls spread out of her pillows and drifted off.

“The pest in your woods is taken care of.”

The General was unsurprised to find the Headmaster watching the sunrise over the forest. Nor to see Minerva waiting anxiously at his side.

“I suppose you’ve come to name your price,” the Headmaster said gamely, without taking his eyes off the window.

The General stopped at the top of the staircase and lilted his chin. “You are correct in one.”

“This is outrageous,” Minerva’s mouth quivered with fury. She clutched the neck of her dressing robe and her wand. “It is an _injustice, _Albus-”

“I beg your pardon,” the General inclined his head to her politely, “I have an engagement, and therefore do not have time. You shall have to shelve your histrionics. I want her for the summer, at my manor in Derbyshire.”

“Absolutely not,” Minerva blustered.

He smiled. “It was not a request.”

“What will you do with... your young lady?” the Headmaster asked him.

“Albus, you’re not considering-”

“Protect her,” he spoke over the blathering witch. “As you so clearly cannot.”

The Headmaster made a quarter-turn and regarded him. There was sadness, and resolution, in his eyes.

“What else?” he asked quietly.

The General’s indignation flared.

“You mean do I intend to breed her?” he snarled.

Minerva looked faint.

“As she has only _barely _begun to cycle, and is still a little child, I should think not. Do you honestly believe for even a moment that the inappropriateness of this arrangement escapes me? Putting her polluted bloodline aside. Hear me when I tell you, no one feels more keenly the _wrongness _of this union than I do. _Nevertheless-”_

He stepped inside the room.

“She is my lady, the bearer of my namesake and mother of my _future _children-” he regarded Minerva glaringly, “however far-off they may be. You people are so woefully ill-equipped to protect her it is an embarrassment. It is laughable. She belongs. To me.”

He fixed Dumbledore with a razor stare.

“I killed the specter. My price is the girl.”

The Headmaster smiled ruefully. “I thought we did not bargain for her life.”

“I said gamble, if you remember,” the General said dangerously, “And the next time you hide your precious artifact behind her, know that I will consider it just that – a gamble. On _your _life, not hers.”

“Artifact?” Minerva looked to the old wizard. “Wha-what is he talking about, Albus?”

“Never mind that now, Minerva. Never mind that now…” again, the Headmaster was staring out the window at the Highlands. Where the wind stirred gently the tops of the forest’s trees.

“You have your summer, General Hux,” he said finally.

Minerva gasped, “No, Albus, _please. _Think of the girl.”

“I am,” was all he said.

“Headmaster. House Mistress,” the General inclined his head to both of them before retreating, triumph roaring in his heart. “Good day.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

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